Chaos and disorder
Two boys, a girl, a rubbish dump and a football match. It’s all the Egyptian filmmaker Nadine Khan needed to tell a complex and occasionally humoristic story about the complicated relationships between young people in a deprived neighbourhood of Cairo where life amounts to a survival course. The director belongs to a new generation of Arab female filmmakers whose work is currently screened in EYE.
Zaki and Mounir are both in love with the beautiful Manal, the greengrocer”s daughter, and are vying for her hand. Without Manal having anything to say in the matter, the two boys decide to face off in a soccer game: the winner gets to marry Manal, and bets can be placed on the outcome.
The filmmaker subtly brings home how the protagonists are forced to survive in an isolated, stifling world; they live in one of the poorest neighbourhoods of Cairo – a sort of exotic Bronx – not far from a rubbish dump, where they barely manage to scrape a living and only a game of soccer or a round of PlayStation offers some relief. But what goes on inside their heads? What do they actually feel?
Raw humour serves as an outlet for people in a city controlled by politics and religion.
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Where Do We Go Now?
‘Powerful, poignant, vibrant and provocative’, is how guest curator Ludmila Cvikova – Head of International Programming at the Doha Film Institute in Qatar from 2011 to 2014 – qualifies her selection of award-winning films.
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