Long before he was directing music videos for one of the biggest DJs on the planet, Chndy was already making videos. He just did not know that was what directing was called. Growing up in Oman during the early days of YouTube, he spent countless hours filming himself dancing, creating fake music videos, and uploading them online long before content creation became a career path or filmmaking felt like a realistic profession.
For Chndy, there was never a grand moment of realization where he decided to become a director. Instead, one thing led to another, and he found himself on film sets, assisting art directors, observing crews, and learning how productions functioned from the inside out. By the time he eventually stepped behind the camera himself, directing felt like the natural culmination of years spent collecting creative skills from every corner of the industry.
That winding path helps explain why Cairo Express feels so unlike most music videos. It borrows from every chapter of the multi-hyphenates life at once. There are traces of internet culture in its absurd humor, echoes of anime in its exaggerated characters, and elements of documentary photography in the way it observes people. Watching it feels a bit like scrolling through the contents of somebody’s brain at three o’clock in the morning, where childhood memories, memes, overheard conversations, music videos, and years of visual references all coexist.
What makes the music video particularly compelling is that beneath all the absurdity lies genuine observation. Chndy has been visiting Egypt throughout his life, and many of the video’s strangest moments are rooted in real experiences, real people, and real scenes he has encountered over the years.
It also avoids many of the clichés international productions tend to rely on when depicting Egypt. There are no lingering shots of pyramids, no dusty golden filters, no attempt to package the city into something easily digestible for foreign audiences. Instead, the director leans into the humor, noise, unpredictability, and sensory overload that define everyday life in one of the world’s most densely populated cities.
In many ways, the music video feels like the clearest expression yet of who Chndy is as an artist. For years, audiences have encountered different versions of him. There is Chndy the photographer, whose lens has captured campaigns for luxury heavyweights like Louis Vuitton and Palm Angels. There is Chndy the art director and graphic designer, whose visual fingerprints can be found across some of the region’s most exciting creative projects, including the creative direction and design behind Saudi artist Saud’s album High Octane. Then there is Chndy the filmmaker, a role he has been steadily growing into for years. Cairo Express is perhaps the first project where all those identities collide at once. “I realized people didn’t really see anything I’ve directed with my full interests. This goes more in a direction that’s closer to my personality,” he says.
Part of that comes down to creative freedom. The creative polymath says that throughout his career, somewhere between approvals, logistics, and production realities, his ideas tend to get watered down. Cairo Express feels like the rare exception. Rather than pulling him back, DJ Snake encouraged him to push further, resulting in perhaps the most unfiltered glimpse yet into Chndy’s wonderfully weird imagination.
That imagination has been shaped by a creative journey that stretches far beyond film. Born in Muscat, the pseudonymous creative spent years moving between disciplines and cities before arriving at this moment. After relocating to Dubai in 2014, he spent much of the following decade between the UAE and Saudi Arabia, becoming a fixture within a rapidly evolving regional creative scene. Along the way, there were stints at Telfaz11, artistic residencies that took him as far as Japan, countless shoots, campaigns, and creative experiments, each adding another layer to an already difficult-to-define practice.
Perhaps that refusal to be boxed into a single discipline is exactly what makes his work so distinctive. Watching Cairo Express feels like stepping inside the mind of someone who never stopped looking at the world with the curiosity of a kid armed with a camera and unrestricted internet access. The video is chaotic, yes, but it is also meticulously observed. Beneath the absurdity lies a genuine affection for the people and places it depicts. The humor never feels cynical and the weirdness never feels forced.
When speaking about DJ Snake’s enthusiasm for the project, Chndy still sounds slightly incredulous by it all. “It shows he’s really tapped in, because I’m just a kid from Oman, I guess,” he says. It is a modest way of describing someone who has spent the last decade helping put the small Gulf country on the map.
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