Better Go Mad in the Wild
One of the two Egyptian films screening in the official competition of the eighth El Gouna Film Festival (16-24 October) is Colonia (My Father’s Scent), written and directed by Mohamed Siam. It’s a father-and-son story centred on a single attempt to resolve their differences in the course of a single night.
My Father’s Scent, Siam’s fiction debut, opens with an old man (Kamel Al-Basha) being released from hospital after a six-month coma caused by terminal cancer, spending the night in the care of his younger son Farouk (played by Ahmed Malek in what is perhaps the greatest performance of his career to date), who is struggling with addiction and did not visit him once at hospital. The next day, despite the elder son Ali (Abed Anani) prevailing on Farouk to look after the father before returning to his own home — Ali knows how reckless his brother can be — the father dies. The film captures the tense emotions between the two brothers as Ali begins to guilt-trip Farouk right after the father passes, but the drama of the film focuses on what transpired between father and son during that night after the fact of the father’s death: the layered aggression they have had for each other since the sudden death of Farouk’s mother, for which he blamed his father; and their inability to reconcile despite trying hard enough to come close to it.
Another sequence shows how Farouk’s family issues affect his relationship with his girlfriend (Mayan Al-Sayed), who blames him for disappearing on her. In the course of that fateful night, as it turns out, father and son decide to drive to Alexandria, playing old songs on the way, but after another charged exchange Farouk ends up walking out of the restaurant and leaving his father alone at the table. Siam’s dialogue can be confusing as it attempts to reflect decades’ worth of complex relations, but it communicates clearly the emotions of anger, frustration, nostalgia and the unlikely love father and son have for each other in spite of everything. Siam ably directs his cast through a poetic, conversation-rich piece to reveal distinct personalities and deep emotional landscapes. Al-Basha shows charisma playing a father who doesn’t care about his son’s frustrations, and the cinematography complements the action, adding to the tension by shooting through shattered glass, for example. Siam’s courage in exploring the delicate theme of the pain of reconciliation is a credit to his talent. Coproduced by Mohamed Hefzy’s Film Clinic and ArtKhana, founded by Siam, the film received five awards at the Venice Film Festival, where it was selected as a project in progress in the Final Cut programme on the fringe of the festival in September 2024. Siam’s debut documentary Whose Country? premiered at the New York Film Festival, followed by another documentary, Amal, which opened the IDFA and won awards at the Sheffield Film Festival.
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Narrated by a wise, all-knowing cow, the remarkable Czech documentary Better Go Mad in the Wild by Miro Remo, screened in the documentary official competition, is about life and death. Following identical twins Ondřej and František Klišík (Ondra and Franta) through their daily routines in the Šumava Mountains, where they live. Remo told me that he was on a vacation with his father in Croatia when his father bought him a book with the same title that includes pleasant stories, one of which was that of the two brothers: “I contacted the writer and that’s when he accompanied me to Sumava Mountains to meet the twins and we discussed the possibility to make a film and we took it step by step.”
The 84-minute documentary shows how the two bearded men share almost everything in this remote place where they raise chickens and a cow, even though their needs and spirits differ entirely from each other. It’s a delicate, rich documentary about what makes life worth living and the hidden truths by which human beings know themselves and others. There is almost no dialogue apart from the occasional quarrel, or when one of them briefly discusses death — reiterating what they both believe about the afterlife — while slaughtering a chicken. At one point they can be seen sunbathing on the rooftop of their small house in the middle of nowhere, at another snow indicates that the season has changed. Remo added that it took him five years to complete the film and that he faced production problems especially during the Covid19 lockdown.
“I connected with the two brothers after a while,” he explained. “Franta was a poet and after reading his poetry, it was easy to connect with him on so many levels. I previously did a documentary about the Slovak pop star Richard Müller under the title Richard Müller: Nespoznaný (2016), and another recent documentary, At Full Throttle (2021), about the life struggle of a former miner. So I like to do films about people who are on the edge of the system.”
The film depicts the tension between tranquility and discontent and how they both deal with the world from that remote place, highlighting their political past when they joined the Šumava underground, non-violent resistance movement. At the beginning of the film, the viewer will almost certainly mistake them for one person, but soon enough their different physiques — one is missing an arm — and their entirely distinct personalities become very obvious; the film’s running joke is that the one with the missing arm always wins at arm wrestling. Other details include a large, round mirror which they sometimes carry outside so that it can be seen reflecting the sky and the horizon, serving Dušan Husár’s cinematography, and tearing down a wall inside the house as their differences intensify, as well as a conversation in which they wonder which of them will die first — the implication, never stated, is that the other will be left completely alone in the wilderness. Remo commented on the mirror, “It was my idea, because I saw that those brothers have a big problem in their relationship, and I wanted to bring some quiet scenes and reflections to the film, that’s why I introduced the mirror element.” With very few elements, little artifice and incredible economy of means, Remo offers a captivating and gripping experience. In the closing credits we are told that Franta died on 12 July 2025.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 23 October, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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