In October 2000, I traveled to Cairo to study and garner support for my efforts to preserve Egyptian film classics. Before I visited the Egyptian Film Company, which stores the negatives and positives of nearly all surviving Egyptian film, I knew about the fires at Studio Misr in 1950 and 1980, which destroyed a lot of nitrate negatives. However, that was nothing compared to what I was about to find happening to beloved Egyptian classics in the Company's so-called storage facilities…

When I arrived in Giza, on the outskirts of Cairo, at the office of the director in charge of storage, I was impressed with how grand his office was, and how cool the air conditioning was keeping it. My hopes rose that the storage facility was doing its job. Then the staff took me back to the warehouse where the movies of my childhood heroes and idols were stored. A decaying wooden door with an old rusted lock separated the non-nitrate film from nitrate film.

I was in a nitrate film slaughterhouse. It was 4 feet by 12 feet of rusted nitrate film cans being cooled by a creaky overhead fan and a broken glass window through which blew in the smog and dust of Cairo. I held in my hands the rusted and decomposed reels of the films I had grown up with. Even worse were the films that had dissolved into something resembling a pale powder as they rotted in rusted cans. Stunned, I asked the technician why these films were being kept in the same room with films still in salvageable condition. He shrugged and said, "It's part of the inventory."