Alexandria, Why? marked a radical, newly introspective turn in Chahine’s active career, a sharp departure from his Fifties musicals and melodramas and his later epics and political films. The first of Chahine's four film semi-autobiography, entitled “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” Alexandria, Why? focuses on a precocious adolescent whose dreams and colorful attempts to become an actor unfold against the vivid backdrop of Alexandria during World War II. A rich ensemble cast inspires Chahine's young thespian hero with a wealth of dramatic subplots—at turns hilarious and touching—about wartime life. The autobiographical nature and nostalgic flavor of Alexandria, Why? make it one of Chahine’s most accessible works, a charming and entertaining film that also delivers a potently subversive and impassioned anti-war message.

The sequel to the autobiographically inspired Alexandria, Why?, An Egyptian Story covers the beginning of Chahine’s career up to his open-heart surgery in 1973. Chahine plays his alter-ego Yehia, who gains international fame in Europe only to discover that, as in Egypt, film is as much commerce as art. The section of the film dealing with Chahine’s heart attack and surgery contains two remarkable sequences. In one, Yehia travels to London for the surgery and becomes infatuated with a (male) British cab driver. The other brings the film to a phantasmagoric climax as Yehia, on the operating table, imagines himself forced to justify his life and work before a tribunal in an eccentric sequence inspired by Chaplin, 8-1/2 and All That Jazz.