Furigat

Furigat (Arabic: فرجت, translated as All's Well) is an Egyptian film released on July 2, 1951. The film is directed by Hussein Fawzi, features a screenplay by Abo El Seoud El Ebiary, and stars Naima Akef, Mohsen Sarhan, Abbas Fares, and Hassan Fayek. The plot revolves around a belly dancer named Sett al-Kul who dreams of fame and money fronting a traveling music group. She sees her opportunity when her father returns a wealthy woman's lost purse, whereupon she offers to perform in the grandee's band.
The musicians of the Ataba and Zamar neighborhoods of Cairo are down on their luck and squatting in a coffee shop without regular gigs. Qanun player Abu al-Khair (Abu al-Khair), currently unemployed like the rest, leads an informal troupe while his daughter Sett al-Kul (Naima Akef sings and dances in a cabaret together with their neighbor Karawan (Hassan Fayek) and his daughter Sobia (Nawal Baghdadi). When the cabaret director tries to sell Sett al-Kul to a nouveau riche enriched by the 1948 Arab—Israeli War, she and Karawan refuse the dishonor and slap the patron, resulting in their expulsion to join the rest of the unemployed musicians.
Karawan suggests that Abu al-Khair come work for the latter's colleague, Maestro Bulbul (Abdel Salam Al Nabulsy), the talented leader of a large performing troupe holding forth at the Nefertiti Theater. Abu al-Khair agrees and tries to audition, but Bulbul does not remember him and has his guard Metwally (Mokhtar Hussein) kick Abu al-Khair out of the Nefertiti. Outside the theater, Abu al-Khair finds a purse with a significant amount of money in it and no owner in sight. Upon his return home, he finds the landlady, Umm Gemmayze (Widad Hamdi), threatening him with eviction, so he opens the purse to pay some rent. She returns the purse to him, upon which he asks for help getting Bulbul to hire the local musicians. When neighborhood star Nour el-Ayoun Hanim (Samia Roshdi) travels to Lebanon, however, all hope appears lost.
Sett al-Kul meets the wealthy Adnan Bey (Fouad Shafiq), patron of Bulbul's band, and asks for help. Since he wants to stymie his mistress, the star singer Nargis (Zomoroda), from blackmailing him for £E5,000 to avoid revealing his love letters she kept, Adnan Bey agrees to hire Sett al-Kul. She joins the band, learns of and confiscates the love letters, and is established as the patron's new mistress to the chagrin of the defeated Nargis. Nargis meets Adnan Bey's son Hosni (Mohsen Sarhan), with whom she falls in love. Sett al-Kul delivers the letters to Adnan Bey, and they agree to merge the neighborhood musicians with Bulbul's Nefertiti band. Sett al-Kul is evicted by Umm Gemmayze, but Karawan and Sobia hire a cabbie named Tosca (Mohammed El-Bakkar) to kidnap Adnan Bey and Nargis and bring them in to tell the truth about their situation. Hosni, enamored with Sett al-Kul's virtue, marries her, and the Bulbul troupe performs happily ever after.
Maher Zuhdi wrote in July 2015 in the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida that:
The film is based on a German play found by actor Hussein Sedki, while the screenplay and song lyrics were from the pen of Abo El Seoud El Ebiary. Casting actors with whom Akef had worked before, Fawzi was able to situate the story in a more Egyptian context.
Fawzi had returned from vacation in Beirut to attend the premiere in Cairo alongside Akef and Mohsen Sarhan. Sarhan proposed to her afterwards, but she refused and married Fawzi, with whom she would divorce in 1958.
Film critic Sami el-Salamouny wrote of Hussein Fawzi:
Waseem Afifi wrote for the website تراثيات (“Heritage”) the article “زوج نعيمة عاكف الموهوب الذي لم ينال الشهرة” (“Naima Akef’s Talented Husband, Who Did Not Achieve Fame”):
Afifi notes the director's work to bring Akef's potential to the silver screen as “a slum girl seeking to employ her family in the theatre in the movie Furigat.” Continuing to narrate the director and his star's artistic and personal relationship, he writes:
The magazine Al-Hilal wrote that the success of the duo of Mohsen Sarhan and Naima Akef earned them “the cover of [local film publication literally meaning “star”] Al-Kawakeb Magazine on July 1, 1951, for their work in Furigat.