First cover of Yasra
At a party in Heliopolis, TV director Mohamed Salem saw a beautiful young woman whose name he knew was Sivin. He quickly offered her a role and she said, "No problem." They agreed that he would call her later.
The next day, director of photography Abdel Halim Nasr was at the Shooting Club reading a morning newspaper and saw a picture of Yousra. He shouted, "I found her!" He arranged to meet her in his office on 26th of July Street. At the beginning of the meeting, he told her, "I want to produce a film that is as successful as a film my company produced years ago, 'Shatea El-Gharam' starring Laila Murad and Hussein Sedki." The surprise came when he offered her the lead role in "El-Wishah El-Abyad" (The White Scarf), a story by writer Mohamed Abdel Halim Abdullah, which was renamed "Qasr Fi El-Hawa" (A Palace in the Air) when it was released. It was the first film directed by Abdel Halim Nasr after he had been one of the most prominent directors of photography for more than thirty years. Yousra's fee for the film was one thousand pounds, which was considered a large sum of money by the standards of the time.
This exclusive photo was taken by "Al-Mawed" around the same time as the of filming the movie "Qasr Fi Al-Hawa" which remained "in the box" and was released three years after it was filmed. This photo was taken on the Nile Corniche before filming the movie. Yousra recalls that her first cover in her artistic career was in Al-Mawed magazine, and Badih Serbey chose to put her picture on the cover even though she had not risen to fame and had not acted in the movie yet, because he knew that she was a potential big star. Yousra's covers in Al-Mawed continued before her movies were shown and she became the star of Al-Mawed before becoming a movie star, and what Badih Serbey predicted came to pass and Yousra became a big star and for several decades she has been reaping success and people's love with every new artistic work she presents.
This photo is from a collection of photos published by Yousra, including the cover of the issue (No. 671) on Thursday, July 17, 1975.
By May Serbey Chehab, from the Book "Boulevard of Stars: The Golden Age of Arab Entertainment"