Many historical incidents can act as inspirations to filmmakers worldwide, whether their final artistic product is a narrative or a documentary. History itself may cast dramatic shadows on the lives of human beings, and it may reflect deeper struggles that shape societies and individuals alike.
Egyptian director Bassam Mortada in his latest long documentary Abo Zaabal 89 uses a famous historical incident from 1989 to examine what has happened since that time in how own personal life and family. The film has won several awards, including for Best Documentary and the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) award at the 2024 Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF).
The CIFF scheduled two additional screenings of the film to make it easier for people to see after the two official screenings were fully booked. Last week, the film was screened as part of the Cairo Film Days at the Cinema Zawya in Downtown Cairo.
Egypt during the 1980s witnessed a lot of political contestation, although former President Hosni Mubarak was more cautious in adopting decisions regarding economic open-market policies (the Infitah) than his predecessor former President Anwar al-Sadat, thus avoiding movements like those of 18 and 19 January 1977, which were known as the Bread Riots.
However, Mubarak and his Government did make some economic and financial decisions that led to protests during this decade, like what happened with textile workers at Mahala and Kafr al-Dawar in the Delta between 1984 and 1989. During this time, the security forces tried hard to suppress the protests of the workers, and many leftwing activists were also involved in supporting workers in public-sector factories, notably the iron and steel workers in Helwan in 1989.
Then Minister of the Interior Zaki Badr threatened that the police could storm the sit-in organised by the workers at any time. What then happened is considered to be one of the most important incidents in the history of the Egyptian workers’ struggle and led to the death of one worker and the arrest of the leaders of the sit-in, including their supporters from leftist political parties. Among them was Mahmoud Mortada, the filmmaker’s father.
Bassam Mortada begins his film with a traumatic scene that has haunted his life since he was five years old. The scene was not the police raid on his apartment in search of his father, however, because he was sleeping at the time. In fact, his mother insisted that he should go to school the next day, and he was confused because he was told there that his father had been arrested the night before.
Instead, Bassam, the narrator of the film, tells the audience that the traumatic scene in question was when his mother Fardous was frying an enormous quantity of fish in the kitchen. She was preparing food for a visit to his father in prison, and the food was for him and his comrades. In his film, Bassam shoots this scene in a humble kitchen with dim lighting.
Perhaps this is because the cooking happened before dawn so that his mother would be able to take the food to the prison in the early morning. Perhaps it was done intentionally to give the audience an anxious feeling similar to what young Bassam felt at the time. He makes this scene the introductory incident that opens his personal story.
It may be that the film is intended not only as an artistic project but also as part of a process of psychological recovery from that period for the director, since his father’s arrest led to the family’s disintegration, in addition to traumatic memories that have kept haunting him.
In the beginning of the film, Bassam tries to recall what happened at that time by conducting interviews with his father, his mother, and a couple of his friends who participated in the protests in 1989. The interviews include memories of what happened during his father’s imprisonment. One of the most interesting parts is when his father tells his son that he has forgotten that his close friend, the famous film actor Sayed Ragab, was also among those who were arrested during the protests. He asks to watch a theatre piece in which Ragab performs the arrest and imprisonment of one of the activist workers. As a result, his son manages to shoot Ragab’s show inside his film together with his father’s reactions.
It might seem to the audience that making a documentary with family members and friends is relatively uncomplicated. However, the sensitivity of the subject makes the film hard and sometimes painful to watch.
Bassam uses other tools besides the usual documentary tool of interviews to complete the story. He sometimes uses letters or recorded messages to express his feelings or to tell his plans, like when he tells a friend who lives abroad that he is going to visit his father and his friend to celebrate the latter’s birthday.
Interviewing his mother was not easy, even as she seems to be the second main character in the film and sometimes even the first one. From the beginning, she was the core of the family when his father was in prison. She was also part of the leftist movement that supported the workers. When Bassam asks her about how her relationship with his father deteriorated after his release from prison, she says they he became a different person.
He did not talk much, and then in 1994 he became involved in supporting a leftist worker in the parliamentary elections, she says. The campaign was hectic, but the candidate won. However, then the candidate that his father had supported, now an elected MP, told his father that he intended to join the then ruling National Democratic Party in order to serve the people of his electoral district more effectively.
The incident damages what was left of his father after his release. He leaves his family and travels to Austria where he marries another woman. After a few years, he returns to Egypt, but after a while it seems that divorce is inevitable. Throughout her interviews, Bassam’s mother is suffering from laryngeal cancer, making her testimony even harder.
Although the film contains emotions regarding incidents in the past, Bassam Mortada avoids slipping into the comfortable cliches of nostalgia. He manages to walk the thin line of remembering the past, revealing his feelings, and exploring the feelings of his two main characters – his father and his mother. He could have been easily pulled over into melodrama when he includes the death of his mother in the last part of the film, but even so he manages to remember her at her best in his talks with his father.
He even adds some lightheartedness to many situations, perhaps the most important being when he and his father are visiting a piece of land that the latter has bought in Fayoum in a village called Al-Fardous. His father tells him that he always said that Fardous, Bassam’s mother’s name, would follow him even after her departure.
He also inserts dream scenes in the film a couple of times. One shows a child’s hands holding the railings of a balcony as if about to fall and perhaps recounting a trauma that Bassam suffered when he was a child. Apparently, he used to dream this dream many times, and the only thing that was not true about it was the thing that his mother had asked him to include – which was that as a child he had shouted to his father for help and his father had not answered.
The film shows that his mother and his father loved each other very much. Perhaps when Fardous told her son to include this sequence in the dream it was because she wanted the father to return to what he had earlier been in the family.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 22 May, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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