In My Father’s Scent, Mohamed Siam compresses a lifetime into a single night. A father and son, locked within the walls of an apartment, are forced to sit with the weight of what’s been said, what was never said, and the versions of each other they invented. This is a film that treats memory not as a flashback device, but as a thick, intimate, sometimes suffocating and strangely tender atmosphere. My Father’s Scent refuses to be “about” one family in the narrow sense. It is about the way families become narratives, how parents turn into symbols, and how children grow up possessed by ghosts that still feel alive.
Siam also produced the film, alongside Mohamed Hefzy, through their production companies Film Clinic and ArtKhana. The creative team includes cinematographer Omar Abou Douma, editor Ahmed Hafez, and screenwriter Ahmed Amer, who co-wrote the film with Siam. Additional co-producers include Ingrid Lill Hogtun, Fady Atallah, and Guillaume de Seille.
The film opened in Egypt last week, with a theatrical release set for 7 January, followed by the Arab regional release on 15 January. It premiered internationally at the Warsaw International Film Festival in October 2025, and had its MENA premiere the same month at the eighth El Gouna Film Festival.
The film gained traction at festivals. Ahmed Malek won two acting awards for his role: Best Artistic Contribution at the Fajr International Film Festival and Best Actor at El Gouna. The film also won the Production Design Award at the 2025 Carthage Film Festival, the AlUla Audience Award for International Film at the Red Sea International Film Festival, and the Grand Prix and Cineuropa Award at Cinemamed 25 in Brussels.
A family drama staged within an apartment, My Father’s Scent challenges traditional family dynamics and exposes the quiet oppression of patriarchy, generational struggles, and the fragile, painful work of reconciliation. Siam describes it as a film about toxic masculinity and contemporary manhood in a society built on false appearances. Its strength lies in how it examines these ideas through a close, tense encounter, stripping the drama down to emotional truth. It unfolds as a poetic odyssey, peeling back layers of misunderstanding, moving through the highs of confrontation and the lows of regret. Beneath the conflict is the film’s central, haunting question, which Siam articulates with devastating clarity: “If each of us who has lost a loved one could spend one final night with them, would we settle old scores or mend broken bridges?”
The cast brings together three actors from different generations: Ahmed Malek as Farouk (the son), Kamel El Basha as Omar (the father), and Mayan El Sayed as Sarah (Farouk’s girlfriend). Each performance relies less on visual drama than emotional intensity, shaped by the tension of one long night, where the story unfolds in real time, driven by memory, distance, and the emotional weight of relationships that time keeps testing. Malek’s character carries the restlessness of a younger generation shaped by miscommunication, inherited complexes, and an ache for recognition. El Basha embodies a father whose authority is heavy not only because of what he believes, but because of what he cannot admit. And Mayan El Sayed enters as a presence that disturbs the established rhythm by simply existing with a different kind of emotional honesty.
Asked how he chose Malek, El Basha, and El Sayed, and how he brought out unexpected sides, particularly in Mayan’s performance, Siam described the casting in an interesting way: “Malek, Kamel, and Mayan came together like the pieces of a puzzle. I was looking for actors whose energies could both clash and harmonise in surprising ways. Malek brings a restless intensity, Kamel carries quiet gravitas, and Mayan radiates raw female energy. Each of them had layers I knew hadn’t been fully explored on screen, especially Mayan who had often been typecast as the girl next door. I chose to explore with them the hidden corners of themselves they could bring into the story.”
According to Siam, the preparation was less about rehearsing lines and more about creating a backstory and an atmosphere where they could shape their roles from the inside out. “With Mayan especially, I encouraged her to allow the audience to discover a deeper, unexpected strength in her performance. It was a process of trust, building a space where each actor could dare to reveal something new”.
In a film built around confrontation, the danger is always theatricality, performances that lean into volume, into obvious drama. Siam’s method suggests the opposite: build a lived past that actors carry quietly. Let silence do part of the work. That approach also aligns with the film’s thematic concern: generational miscommunication is not only about what is said; it is about what cannot be said.
What gives the film its emotional charge is that it does not treat reconciliation as a clean arc. It treats it as something messy, often resisted, and failing. What time has broken cannot be mended in a single night, and the film does not pretend otherwise. Instead, it asks what one night can reveal: the shape of love underneath resentment; the tenderness buried inside anger; the fear that often hides behind authority. Even when the film confronts masculinity, it does so not by demonising the father figure but by showing how masculinity itself can be a trap, a structure built on false appearances, sustained by silence, rewarded by emotional illiteracy.
At the heart of the film is Siam’s response to losing his own father at a very early age, even though, as he insists, the story’s details have nothing to do with his own life: “In grief, you’re torn between regrets and the tenderness of memories, what wasn’t said and what could have been healed. And that is where that question was born. Cinema felt like the only language vast enough to hold that contradiction: intimate yet universal, painful yet beautiful. With film, I could invite others into that night, where love and unfinished words coexist, and ask them individually to confront their own ghosts.”
Though the film is rooted in an Egyptian family story, Siam speaks of a visual language that transcends geography: “By embracing a visual language that blends local textures with a timeless, almost dreamlike palette, I wanted the film to become both personal and universal – to not even know or care where the film took place or at what year. It could take place anywhere at any time. Narratively, I gravitate towards simplicity rather than dictating or shouting. I preferred to invite viewers to project their own memories, emotions, and questions onto the story. This balance is between the intimacy of Egypt and the openness of a universal canvas.”
One of the film’s most resonant layers is its portrayal of generational sadness where the ties are built on misunderstanding. The son is not simply angry; he is tired. He longs to be understood in a world of rigid traditions and deaf ears. As if the film is an attempt to give voice to a younger generation struggling to be heard. According to Siam, GenZ has a weird relationship today with older generations, doomed to miscommunication. The son’s relationship with his father is marked by love, distance and silence. “I wanted to capture how so many young people inherit their parents’ complexes and fears, and it can feel suffocating when there is no space for dialogue. Through Malek, I tried to give voice to a generation searching for connection and recognition, even when the world around them seems unable to listen. It’s less about confrontation and more about the ache of wanting to be understood, a longing that I think resonates universally.”
Siam’s path to this film has been long. Since Amal in 2017, he has expanded into co-directing, producing and co-producing other filmmakers’ works. “The road has been long but transformative,” he says. “I worked on a few documentary projects that I was co-directing that have carried me further, one of which was screened at the Berlinale, and since then I’ve expanded into producing and co-producing other filmmakers’ works. Films that went on to premiere in Venice, TIFF (like SINK by Zain Duraei), and more to come. I’ve taken the time to experiment, and to let life experiences shape the kind of cinema I want to make.
“The biggest challenge was financial. Making films in our region often feels like walking a tightrope between funds, festivals’ exotic demands and resilience. But these years taught me patience and faith in the long arc of storytelling. That’s what carried me here, to this new film, with a renewed sense of clarity and heart to finish my other films in pre-production.”
After going on the festival circuit, Siam believes the theatrical release returns the film to the audience that first inspired it, allowing it to resonate locally: “The film is drawn from the small, familiar moments of everyday life. While I never set out to calculate its audience reach, I knew it was an Egyptian story and it would mean much more here than anywhere else. I always hoped that people would see themselves reflected on screen. For its theatrical release, I hope viewers will walk out of the cinema carrying an image or a tune from the film with them that stirs a memory or a feeling that lingers. If it connects in that quiet, personal way with audiences, that will be a meaningful reward.”
* A version of this article appears in print in the 15 January, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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