Reem El Adl

With her name long-attached to more than 30 TV hits and blockbuster films, Costume Designer Reem El Adl believes that she has to be involved in every aspect of the overall appearance of a character and that the costume designing process is not only about determining the features of a character but also studying characters, even before casting actors. Reem El Adl has worked on many non-mainstream films and TV series that take place in various times and settings, such as the TV series Al Shawarea Al Khalfeya (Back Streets), Sedna Al Sayed, Segn El Nesa (Women's Prison), Wahet El Ghoroub, and the films Al Saffah, Samir wa Shahir wa Bahir, Nawara, Clash, Mawlana, and Sheikh Jackson. El Adl studied Sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts. After working as an assistant costume designer in several films and TV series, she eventually made her first film Oreed Khol'an (2005). She was then trained by veteran costume designer Nahed Nasrallah for a whole year. After receiving her diploma from The Accademia Italiana Arte Moda Design in Florence, Italy , she designed costumes for the films Kharej Ala El Kanoun (2007), Sharea 18 (2008), and Waraet Shafra (2008). Reem got her big break in 2009 in the film Al Saffah (The Murderer) by director Saad Hendawy, where she was able to create a different world and take audiences back to the 80s and 90s. She then went on to design costumes for films, including Telk Al-Ayam (Those Days) (2010), Samir wa Shahir wa Bahir (2010), which features the 70's fashion, the thriller Mesawar Qateel (2012), Nawara (2015), for which she received the Best Costume Design Award from the Annual Film Society Festival For Egyptian Cinema, and the film also won its lead actress Menna Shalaby many awards, the black comedy Ali, the Goat and Ibrahim (2016), where the goat was one of the leads, Clash (2016), which brought together Egyptian people of diverse backgrounds. The film had its world premiere at Cannes Film Festival where it was the opener of the prestigious Un Certain Regard section and for her work in the film; Reem received the Best Costume Designer from the Arabian Cinema Awards (ACA). Other titles that Reem worked on include Mawlana (2017), where Amr Saad played a religious preacher, Sheikh Jackson (2017), where Reem brilliantly blended the Sufi costumes and Michael Jackson's most iconic outfits for Ahmad Al Fishawy and Ahmed Malek who played Sheikhs who were Michael Jackson fans, and EXT. NIGHT (2018). Both of these films had their world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Wahet El Ghoroub TV series (2017) by Kamla Abouzekri is one of the most diverse and rich TV series. Reem received the Best Costume Design award at the Cinema Syndicate Awards (CSA) for her work in that series. It takes place in the late 19th century with characters coming from different backgrounds and cities, such as Alexandria, Cairo, Aswan, and Siwa Oasis. Each character has its own characteristics, especially Catharine, an Irish woman played by Menna Shalaby. El Adl collaborated with director Kamla Abuzekri in the Segn El Nesa TV series (2014), which dove into the world of women's prison in an unprecedented approach. Besides, she worked on many TV series, including Qeset Hob (Love Story) (2010), Al Shawarea Al Khalfeya (2011), Sedna Al Sayed (2012), which takes place in Upper Egypt in the 1920s and 1930s, Al Daeya (The Preacher) (2013), and El Khoroug (2016).

When it comes to her work, Reem has an interest in the psychological dramas like the thriller film Al Daif (2019) that followed the story of a family having dinner with an obsessed extremist. The film premiered at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in Estonia where it won the Audience Award and it received other awards from Malmo Arab Film Festival in Sweden and New Vision International Film Festival in Netherland. Another work of that psychological nature is Fi Kol Osbu' Yowm Goma'a (Every Week Has A Friday) (2020) which features Asser Yassin as a mentally unstable man who isolated himself from everything and everyone around. El Adl is currently preparing for Hisham Abdel Khalek's new international film Jesus and The Others, and wrapped up shooting an episode of Shahid's Nemra2 which is directed by Hadi El Bagouri. Apart from films and TV series, El Adl was part of a myriad of viral TV ads, the latest of which include; the collaboration between Chipsy Egypt and the mobile network operator company Orange Egypt where she transformed Yasmin Raeis and Akram Hosny into Indians, and El Garhy Steel TV ad, which went viral during its premiere on TV in Ramadan 2018, where she turned a number of professional circus performers into a group of construction workers. Most recently, El Adl designed costumes for Vodafone's latest TV ad, featuring Egyptian singers Oka and Ortega. The ad made almost one million views on YouTube in its first day. She also dressed superstar Mohamed Henedy for A'la Kam app TV ad, which reached more than three million views in five days. El Adl also designed costumes for Molto Egypt's Africa Cup of Nations 2019 TV ad campaign. In the light of the growing COVID-19 crisis, Reem El Adl launched an initiative inviting fashion designers to contribute to filling the deficit facing the medical sector by manufacturing cloth face masks through her Facebook account. The concept behind this call is to dedicate these masks for free to ordinary users so that the medical and n95 masks are saved to the medical personnel for their essential uses.