Watching El Sett feels like stepping into a collective memory rather than simply watching a biopic. The film explores the life of the Star of the East, Umm Kulthum, tracing the most defining moments of her personal and artistic journey and the relationships that shaped her career. Yet it does so without linear comfort. Instead, the film mirrors the way memory itself works: fragmented, emotional, and weighted by meaning.
The sound design, the close-ups of faces in trance, the scale of her presence, all of it reinforces that Umm Kulthum was never just a singer. She was an event, a force, a nation in human form.
Structure, Archival Material, and Cameos
El Sett thrives on its carefully layered structure. By zigzagging through time, the film interlaces the monumental and the intimate, blending childhood hardships with towering international performances. Archival recordings of Umm Kulthum’s voice and images from history punctuate the drama, rooting the narrative in reality and creating the sensation that we are glimpsing fragments of the actual past. It is both biopic and collective memory.
The cast complements this archival layering with subtle, affecting performances. Cameos and larger roles by icons like Mohamed Farrag, Ahmed Khaled Salleh, Amina Khalil, Ahmed Helmy, Nelly Karim, Amir El-Masry, Amr Saad and Karim Abdel Aziz, enrich the texture of the film, grounding the story in lived, human interactions while never detracting from Umm Kulthum’s central presence. Each character feels purposeful, adding depth to the portrayal of her world and its challenges.
A Childhood of Survival
Umm Kulthum’s early years are physically and emotionally demanding. We see her traveling for hours on a donkey with her father and brother to sing at weddings, exhaustion and danger are constant companions. In one scene, a violent confrontation erupts, with shotgun fire eerily timed to her singing.
In another, the family crosses a punishing sandstorm only to find the wedding canceled, yet her father insists she sing so they can be paid. From the beginning, her voice sustains her family. The film treats this truth unflinchingly, neither romanticizing nor diminishing it.
Her Father: Love & Authority
The emotional core of El Sett lies in Umm Kulthum’s relationship with her father, portrayed by the one and only Sayed Ragab. He is deeply loving and profoundly influential.
Yet the film refuses to simplify him into a benevolent figure. In one devastatingly quiet moment, while embracing her, he takes the coins she earned from her hand. The gesture is not framed as cruelty but as entitlement shaped by poverty and survival. He believes in her talent and defends her fiercely but he also depends on her labor.
In their most painful conflict, he strikes her to prevent a drunk man with a gun from escalating violence, which is rooted in his belief that humiliation is safer than bloodshed. When she later tells him this will be the last time he ever hits her, it is the marking of a new boundary in their relationship.
What makes this relationship so affecting is its balance. The film does not present it as abusive, nor does it idealize it. Umm Kulthum loves her father deeply. Even after his death, she searches for him in the audience, the one presence that steadies her, the face she looks for before she can sing.
Cairo: Ambition Awakens
When the possibility of greater earnings in Cairo arises, her father hesitates, then gives in. Once there, Umm Kulthum absorbs the city quickly. Her first encounter with a theatre is marked by a glint in her eye, recognition, destiny.
In the city, Umm Kulthum absorbs lessons not only about music but also about power and perception. There is a telling scene in which her father insists they exit a train from the first-class carriage—not because they were seated there, but because appearances command respect.
That lesson resurfaces later when Umm Kulthum negotiates contracts herself, pushing past what her father initially asks for and securing eight percent instead of one. “I know you liked my voice and I know I will be a success,” she asserted confidently. His instincts about dignity and leverage become hers just refined, sharpened, and ultimately surpassed.
Yet even here, danger follows. During her first theatre performance, a drunk man heckles her, then pulls out a gun. Calmly, she tells him: “If you really are the man you think you are then shoot.” The film plays an actual recording of Umm Kulthum recounting this incident herself, grounding the moment in lived truth. It is an unmistakably powerful scene, fearless and unapologetic.
Becoming Herself: Body, Image, and the Voice
Mona Zaki embodies Umm Kulthum with remarkable subtlety, shifting her voice and demeanor to capture both vulnerability and authority. Her performance makes the woman on screen feel real. Every glance, gesture, and tone radiates the depth of emotion behind the legend.
As the film progresses, Umm Kulthum sheds the masculine clothing of her early years and steps fully into her own image. Her appearance evolves but always in alignment with her personality. The film thoughtfully explains her iconic details: the handkerchief she held because her hands sweat on stage, and the cat-eye sunglasses she wore due to Graves’ disease, which affected her eyes.
Most strikingly, the film reveals her refusal to undergo surgery for her illness out of fear that it might damage her vocal cords. Everything bends around the preservation of the voice. Her body, her choices, her risks, all are negotiated through that singular devotion. As her illness worsens, the film shows its physical and emotional toll.
The film also captures the trance she induced, lingering on the ecstatic expressions of her audience, suspended in collective ecstasy.
Love, Loneliness, and the Cost of Devotion
The film delves into Umm Kulthum’s romantic life. We see her reject her composer’s advances to remain his muse, endure a brief and painful affair with royalty, and eventually marry. Again and again, she is asked how she can sing about love without being married, how she can be “Umm” Kulthum without being a mother.
Her answers are sharp, witty, and composed, but the film allows the loneliness behind them to surface. Choosing music above all else is shown not as empowerment alone, but as sacrifice. The cost of ambition real, and it lingers.
Money, Intelligence, and Misread Control
One of the film’s controversies lies in claims that it portrays Umm Kulthum as stingy. This interpretation feels deeply flawed. What the film actually shows is a woman who understands the value of her labor and refuses to let it be exploited.
In one scene, she raises concerns about her brother overspending her money on land, carefully choosing to speak through her father rather than confronting her brother directly, respecting family hierarchy. When her father realizes the critique applies to him as well, she calmly allows him to proceed with a purchase. It is a moment of emotional intelligence, not miserliness.
She supports her family from childhood onward, a dynamic that never truly changes. When she brings them into her lavish Cairo home, she welcomes them warmly, insisting they treat it as their own. Her generosity is constant—but it is never careless.
Politics, Touring, and National Belonging
The film does not shy away from Umm Kulthum’s political intelligence. As the first woman to chair the Musicians’ Syndicate, she faces resistance purely because of her gender. When musicians argue that a woman cannot manage men, she reminds them that she has been managing them successfully for years, and that regardless of the election’s outcome, she will remain Umm Kulthum—while their positions depend on her leadership.
This scene attracted attention because it challenges expectations of how women in leadership should behave. Umm Kulthum is shown as strategic and politically aware.
The film also touches on her later tours to raise money for the Egyptian army, a deeply significant chapter that could have been explored even further. Still, what is shown makes clear that these tours were not symbolic gestures. They were exhausting, political acts of service, transforming her voice into national infrastructure.
Umm Kulthum’s Immortal Presence
The film returns to where it began: Umm Kulthum rising at L’Olympia, steadying herself, and finishing the concert. By this point, the full context is clear—the attack, her forgiveness, her unwavering generosity. The moment is quiet, yet it carries immense weight: she falls, she forgives, and she continues, embodying resilience in its purest form.
Her funeral follows, attended by an estimated four million people, a staggering testament to the magnitude of her life and the depth of the nation’s grief. It is a moment of profound loss, a country brought to stillness by the passing of the woman who sang its soul.
By the end, we see Umm Kulthum not as a flawless icon, but as a woman who lived fully—fierce, tender, ambitious, and unyielding. The film leaves us with her presence, her choices, and the echoes of her voice, lingering long after the final note.
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