Basic Magdy’s The Man who Stole a Bone from the Sahara Confronted by the Shadow of War is, unlike much of his work, inspired by a true story, one that has occupied his imagination since he started working on his 2019 film M.A.G.N.E.T. 

In 1912 a German hobby palaeontologist arrived in Egypt to find early mammal fossils to debunk the common belief at the time that humans originated in Europe. He hired Egyptian workers to perform his excavation. Ernst Stromer ended up finding the remains of an unknown carnivorous dinosaur that he named Spinosaurus Aegyptiacus. He “took” the fossilised remains back to Germany, photographed and documented them, then donated them to a museum in Munich. This museum was eventually bombed during WWII, and the remains were lost forever.