A Woman's Youth (1956) poster
1956 · realism · desire · melodrama

A Woman's Youth

Directed by Salah Abu Seif2h 0m1956
ElsewhereIMDb7.4621TMDB7.68
  • sombre
  • intense
Movie DNA

Sombre, steady, measured realism / desire, grounded in texture. Nihilistic, intimate, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.

How every film is hand-scored →

A rural mother sells her only cow in order to enroll her son, an imam (Shukri Sarhan) at Dar al-Uloom College. When an imam arrives in Cairo, he rents a room in the Citadel area from a domineering woman named Shafa'at (Tahiya Karioka) who is fascinated by his youth and vitality and lures him into practicing vice with her. As a result, he stumbles in his studies and health. At this time, a girl whom she and her father knew from a young age helps him to get rid of all the corruption in which he lives, and her father advises him to stay away from intercessions, but the intercessions plots against him in an attempt to stay with her.

Our read · A Woman's Youth (1956) reads as a sombre, steady, grounded realism · desire · melodrama entry — measured in intensity, intimate in scope, measured in temperature, nihilistic in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.

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The shape of A Woman's Youth

Tonight, this looks like

What watching it is actually like.

You want a sensual Egyptian drama of temptation and a young man's corruption.

ends bittersweetit stays with yousteady all the waygrips by minute 12attention 3/5earns its lengthsubtitles: full
Date nightWith friendsSoloWith parentsKids around
Heads-upexplicit sex

Skip it tonightYou want uplifting tales or dislike stories of sexual obsession.

DNA · twelve axes

The reading.

Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.

Mood · HeavyCosy
Pacing · Slow-burnKinetic
Intensity · GentleExtreme
Weirdness · ConventionalSurreal
Hope · NihilisticRedemptive
Stakes · IntimateEpic
Humour · NoneBroad
Reality · GroundedFantastical
Density · SparseTwisty
Warmth · ColdTender
Auteur · TransparentSignature
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