Selim El Sadek: Creating From the Chaos of Disparate Worlds

There is a quiet persistence in Selim El Sadek’s work—an interest in texture, in the everyday materiality of change. The Egyptian filmmaker, musician, and writer has come to represent a particular sensibility within the region’s independent art scene, one of reflection, experimentation, and a sans-souci attitude to dwell in uncertainty.

Currently based between Cairo and Berlin, he works across cinema and music, exploring how stories are carried through form. “I’ve always been close to people and places in transformation,” says El Sadek. “Maybe it’s just an urge to create documents that reflect where I feel we stand amidst all this chaos.” His practice often engages this tension between the mythical and the contemporary, the poetic and the political, suggesting that these worlds cannot easily be separated.

El Sadek’s name first drew wider attention through his music videos for some of the Arab world’s most distinctive voices, Marwan Pablo and Nadah El Shazly included. His visuals are recognisable not for a single aesthetic, but a tone, one that blends theatrical composition with the pace and grit of the street. His debut EP Taboot, released on Berlin’s MNJM label and later highlighted by Bandcamp, extends these ideas through sound, using rhythm as a way to question narrative and memory.

“I try to create through constant conversation about the possibility of working outside engineered routes,” he says. “Our idealism and hunger for something else aren’t naive or delusional.” That insistence on independence, on staying close to instinct, runs through his work. For El Sadek, creation is as much about community as it is about authorship and the slow, collective process of questioning.

His influences, ranging from Shadi Abdel Salam and Youssef Chahine to Abbas Kiarostami and MC Amin, reveal an artist deeply rooted in regional cinema and literature, yet attuned to global countercultures. “My inspirations evolve all the time, depending on what I’m working on,” he reflects. “But some names keep resurfacing—artists who build worlds with conviction, even in small gestures.”

When asked what fuels his creativity, he offers a candid reply: “Honestly, watching a movie I hated fuels me like nothing else could. It makes me want to throw up, burn tires, or write a film about a family trapped inside a container ship.” Beneath the dry humour is a familiar impulse: to respond and make sense of disorder. El Sadek’s reflections on the region’s cultural landscape are equally grounded. 

“I see two forces working, not fully with the same intentions,” he observes. “One grew organically out of necessity from the wounds of sociopolitical change. The other is woven with the claws of neoliberal strategists, PR entrepreneurs, and their media outlets framing their own vision of which artists are ‘groundbreaking’. I’m not sure we need more ‘groundbreaking’ anything. It’s already cracked, scarred, and burning.” Still, his outlook remains measured, hopeful even. “There are artists and tricksters creating within those cracks—slow, stubborn, and pulsing, forming a more fertile ground,” he continues. 

Now returning to film after a period focused on music, El Sadek is developing his first feature alongside new recordings that lean towards orchestral and lyrical composition. It is a natural extension of his ongoing study of rhythm and narrative—a continuation, rather than a shift. “I think I’m most creative when something frustrates me,” he says. “When I’m trying to find rhythm in chaos and disorder.”