Mahmoud Shalaby

Mahmoud (or Mahmud) Shalaby, or Mahmood Shalabi, is a Palestinian actor born on July 19, 1982, in Acre, Israel. He has appeared in several films produced or co-produced in France and received the award for best male actor at the Film Festival of La Réunion in 2011 for the role of Naïm in the film A Bottle in the Gaza Sea, directed by Thierry Binisti and adapted from the novel Une bouteille dans la mer de Gaza by Valérie Zenatti. He was honored with two other awards at the same festival.

Shalaby grew up in a poor neighborhood in Acre in marked by urban violence. With his friends, he started a rap and hip-hop group, MWR, which is now dissolved. He then managed a café before being contacted by director Keren Yedaya, who gave him his first role in a non-documentary film. He was interviewed in 2008 in the documentary Slingshot Hip Hop by Jackie Reem Salloum, which covered Palestinian hip-hop in three geographic areas: Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.

Shalaby played the role of Toufik in Jaffa, directed by Keren Yedaya and released in 2009, and the role of the Jewish-Algerian singer Salim Halali in Free Men, directed by Ismaël Ferroukhi and released in 2011.

In 2010, Shalaby appeared with Mohammed Bakri in an Arabic short film, The Clock and the Man, adapted from a short story of the same name by the exiled Palestinian novelist Samira Azzam (1927-1967).

He also played Naim, a young Palestinian from Gaza, whose mother was played by Hiam Abbass, opposite a young Israeli woman, Tal, played by Agathe Bonitzer, in a film directed by Thierry Binisti, A Bottle in the Gaza Sea. The film was released in France on February 8, 2012. The film was inspired by a novel by Valérie Zenatti, Une bouteille dans la mer de Gaza.