Akher ayam el madina

Credits

Name: Akher ayam el madina

Country: Ägypten; Deutschland; Großbritannien; Vereinigte Arabische Emirate

Year of publication: 2016

Format: DCP

Color: color

Language : OF m. engl. UT

Duration: 118 Minuten

Direction: El Said, Tamer

Screenplay: El Said, Tamer; Salti, Rasha

Camera: Fayad, Bassem

Editing: Gawad, Mohamed A.; Avakian, Vartan; Bossuet, Barbara

Sound: Barre, Mikael

Guest: El Said, Tamer; Schulte Strathaus, Stefanie

Abstract

In 2007, Tamer El Said started working on a film that was supposed to help him to get a better grasp on his relationship to his home city of Cairo. He wanted to tell the story of a filmmaker called Khalid, whose mother was dying, who had just ended a relationship and who had lost his flat. He didn’t finish shooting the film until December 2010. Downtown Cairo was the main protagonist: Khalid visits flats with estate agents, ends up at a demonstration, roams the streets and meets up with friends, who join him in cafés by day and on rooves by night, looking down onto Tahrir Square. Six weeks after shooting had finished, the whole world was looking down onto the square. It became a stage for a revolution and the media’s symbolic image. El Said’s film material was initially left untouched, because he – like so many others – took to the streets. The editing process of the film turned into a never-ending re-positioning along the material. The events kept coming thick and fast, as the short-term Muslim Brotherhood government was absolved and the military took power once again.
The film’s production story mirrored the social upheavals in Egypt, and it had its world premiere at the Berlinale in 2016.

  Trailer