Rossellini was instrumental in encouraging Abdel Salam to make the film, which tells a story set among the grave robbers of Kurna in Upper Egypt.

"Shadi Abdel Salam's The Mummy was the forerunner of what was to become the hallmark of the neo realism, namely, the preoccupation with the search for identity and the relationship between heritage and character.

The static images of landscape and the rigid expressions of the main characters reflect those of the statues and reliefs found in Ancient Egypt.

[7] The unrestrained sacking of the tombs is represented as a danger, threatening moral decline by inviting greed and sex to undermine the dignity of the tribe and its traditions, replacing the order of the world with chaos.

"[8] Although he went on to direct short fiction and documentaries, The Night of Counting the Years remains Abdel Salam's only full length feature film.

It is based on the true story of the Abd el-Rassuls, an Upper-Egyptian clan that is stealing piecemeal a cache of mummies they have discovered at a tomb (known to modern Egyptologists as DB320) near the village of Kurna, and selling the artefacts on the black market.

The city people (effendis), wealthy Egyptian archeologists, have come - unusually in the hot summer - to try to identify the source of unexplained artefacts which have been found on the black market, following a meeting with French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero.

The restoration process was supported by the World Cinema Foundation, founded by renowned American director Martin Scorsese, and the Egyptian Ministry of Culture.