The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Now Showing: Youssef Nabil’s I Saved My Belly Dancer, marking the first public screening of the film since its acquisition by the museum in 2025. Centred on Youssef Nabil’s 2015 film of the same title, now celebrating its tenth anniversary, the exhibition revisits a work that threads together memory, loss, and cultural longing through the language of cinema.
In I Saved My Belly Dancer, Tahar Rahim embodies Nabil’s alter ego, while Salma Hayek takes on the role of the eponymous dancer, a symbol of a vanishing Egypt and an art form caught between reverence and erasure. “I wanted to talk about belly dancing as an art form that is probably unique to us,” Nabil explains. “It’s our dance… I wanted to talk about saving the idea of belly dancing in my memory, more than anything.”
Curated by Linda Komaroff, Curator and Department Head of Art of the Middle East at LACMA, the exhibition recalls the atmosphere of mid-20th-century Egyptian cinemas. Vintage seating, film posters, and a hand-coloured photographic portrait of Nabil by his mentor Van Leo recreate the sensorial experience of an era that shaped his aesthetic and nostalgia.
Complementing the film are a series of hand-painted silver gelatin prints, an extension of Nabil’s signature practice. Rendered in vivid, dreamlike tones, these photographs blur the boundary between reality and reverie, echoing the film’s meditation on memory and performance.
Through Now Showing: Youssef Nabil’s I Saved My Belly Dancer, LACMA continues its exploration of how cinema and popular culture intersect with visual art across histories and geographies. The presentation aligns Nabil’s work with the museum’s long-standing engagement with time-based media, alongside artists such as Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, Steve McQueen, and Mariko Mori; each probing the porous line between image, memory, and motion.
Location: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
Date: August 24, 2025 until January 11, 2026
About Youssef Nabil
Born in Cairo in 1972, Youssef Nabil began his photographic practice in 1992, staging friends in cinematic scenes inspired by Egyptian, European, and Hollywood films. He developed his signature hand-painted gelatin silver prints, echoing the glamour of mid-20th-century studio portraits—a style shaped by his friendship with photographer Van Leo. After moving to Paris in 2003 and later to New York, Nabil turned the lens inward, exploring identity, nostalgia, and displacement through self-portraiture. His work, deeply tied to Egyptian heritage and cinematic language, spans photography and film. He continues to divide his time between Paris and New York, working on his first feature film.