Veteran Egyptian film-maker Youssef Chahine, Arab cinema’s most celebrated director, died on Sunday aged 82 after several weeks in a coma.

“Youssef Chahine died this morning at 3:30,” said his friend and fellow director Khaled Yussef, who co-directed Chahine’s latest film “Chaos” in 2007.

A funeral ceremony will be held in Cairo on Monday, Yussef said, before Chahine is buried in the family crypt in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria where he was born, Egypt’s official MENA news agency said.

Source: AFP Legendary Egyptian film-maker Chahine dies

Mahmoud Darwish, whose poetry was embraced by his fellow Palestinians as the voice of their suffering, died on Saturday, August 9, two days after major heart surgery in Houston, Texas. President Mahmoud Abbas has declared three days of national mourning to honor the 67-year-old writer. According to a Reuters report,

As news from Houston filtered through, people, some weeping, gathered round candles in the darkened streets of Ramallah. The poet had made his home in the West Bank city since returning in the 1990s from a long exile during which he rose to prominence in Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Palestinian television interrupted programs to air film of Darwish, the “national poet,” reading from his work. Officials said his body would be flown back for burial in Ramallah.

He won new generations of admirers with work that evoked the pain of Palestinians displaced, as he was as a child, by the establishment of Israel 60 years ago, but also did not shrink from criticism and touched on broader human themes, like love.

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