Egyptian documentary Lift Like a Girl by Mayye Zayed won three awards at the 42nd Cairo International Film Festival, which closed on 10 December.
Screened within the festival's international competition, the film won one of the major awards: The Bronze Pyramid Award for best first or second work.
It also won the Youssef Cherif Rizkallah Award — an audience award worth USD 20,000 — and the ISIS Award for best Egyptian film to show the economic and social emancipation of women — worth USD 10,000.
Prior to its release in Egypt, the film won the Golden Dove for Best Film in the German Competition, Long Film category, at the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film, Germany, the 63rd edition of which took place between 26 October and 1 November.
The feature-length documentary Lift Like a Girl had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (10-19 September).
According to the brief released by the filmmaker Zayed on IMDb, the documentary follows a women’s weightlifting community that trains in the streets of Alexandria, focusing on 14-year-old Zebiba as she pursues her dream of becoming a professional weightlifter.
"Her coach, Captain Ramadan, believes so much in her and never takes no for an answer. He has been training world champion weightlifters for more than 20 years, including his daughter Nahla Ramadan, the former world champion, an Olympian and the pioneer of weightlifting in Egypt, as well as Abeer Abdel-Rahman, the first Arab female two-time Olympic medalist. For four years, Zebiba goes through victories and defeats, including major losses that shape her, as she finds her way from dust to gold," the brief reads.
Zayed previously worked on shorts Iskenderia (2012) and A Stroll Down Sunflower Lane (2016), with the latter being screened in the Berlinale in 2016 and going on to win the Best Experimental Film award in the 2019 edition of the Sharjah Film Platform.
She was also one of the six directors and scriptwriters of the collaborative production of drama Odet El-Feran (2013).
Zayed co-founded the Alexandria-based film production company Rufy’s Films and is a founder of Cléo Media, an independent production and distribution company.
Besides her work as a director and producer, Zayed worked as a cinematographer on Veve (2014), a feature film set in Kenya, produced by a German director Tom Tykwer and directed by Kenyan filmmaker Simon Mukali.
Her film I Have a Picture won the El Gouna Star for the Best Arab Documentary Film in 2017.
Short link: