Since its inaugural round in 2012, the annual Luxor African Film Festival (LAFF) has established itself as an essential event for the continent. The 15th LAFF (29 March-3 April) was entitled Haddouta Masriya (An Egyptian Story), after the 1982 film by Youssef Chahine (1926-2008), to mark his centenary. LAFF founders, screenwriter Sayed Fouad (the current president) and filmmaker Azza Al-Husseini (the current director) have made catering to the local scene one of the festival’s main goals, and the Chahine retrospective – featuring five films, some recently restored – is intended to stimulate discussion. Three screenings were attended by one of the stars: Haddouta Masryia by Mohsen Mohieldin; Al-Ekhtiyar (The Choice, 1971) by Seif Abdel-Rahman; and Awdet Al-Ibn Al-Dal (The Return of the Prodigal Son, 1976) by Soheir Al-Morshedy. This generated an emotional, nostalgic forcefield that made the discussions all the more rewarding.
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In this round’s long film competition, interesting films generated debate. The Sudanese film Malekat Al-Qotn (Cotton Queen) by filmmaker Suzannah Mirghani was difficult to make due to the Civil War in Sudan, according to the senior actress Rabha Mohamed Mahmoud, who plays a leading role. Mahmoud said Mirghani made a short film of the same story, called Al-Sit, in 2020, then she wanted to make a feature narrative film. The project started in Port Sudan but the shooting was delayed till it could take place in Egypt, in Al-Fayoum and Giza, where its setting, the Al-Jazirah region, was recreated with the help of decor.
The film follows Nafisa (Nehad Mortada), a teenage girl who lives in a village with her mother, father and grandmother (Rabha), a charismatic and influential elderly lady known as the cotton queen supposedly because she killed the colonial British officer in the local fight against occupation. Nafisa’s grandmother tries to control the girl as she is growing up, leaving childhood and becoming a woman. Nafisa is even ordered not to swim with her fellow friends and peers after harvesting the cotton from the field owned by the grandmother. The grandmother tells her that she will be punished if she does that again, but Nafisa is a free spirit who writes poems and seems to have a crush on Babiker, a young villager, who seems shy as he gives her green onions instead of flowers. Nafisa sometimes sees a boy with wings like Cupid in her sleep but the filmmaker doesn’t want the audience to be too sure that this is a dream.
The drama is multilayered. On the surface there is the conflict Nafisa’s story with Babiker and her parents’ desire to marry her off to a young businessman who arrived recently with a radical development plan for cotton agriculture that includes changing the seeds that give better results but can only be used once and require pesticides. The drama evolves as Nafisa finds a newspaper clip that says her grandmother was crowned the cotton queen by the British officer governing this part of the land in a beauty contest.
The film ends with Nafisa running towards the luxurious house of the young businessman which used to be the house of the British officer and burns the place down, destroying the new cotton seeds. The young generation will build its own critique to the past. The film won LAFF’s Grand Jury Award
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Another significant film in the long competition was God’s Work. The feature narrative debut of South African filmmaker Micheal James, it is about a group of homeless young men in one of the poorest segments of urban society. “I wanted to make a documentary about a place that I have known for a long time in my city, Durban. It was a building that the government used to collect some of the homeless people inside during Covid in 2020. But later I changed my mind and made a fiction film,” James said. “Some of the actors were professionals playing the main characters, while others were from the area.”
Although the filmmaker delves into the real life of that community, he tackles the subject in a contemporary style totally distinct from the realism or neo-realism associated with such issues. James illustrates life inside the building as if it is some dystopian place in a different space and time. This is very clear in one of the first few scenes when Simphiwe is being woken by a friend to help him move new “bodies” to the room designated for them. James shows this room later in a beautifully artistic scene in which Simphiwe is sitting in a chair in the middle of the room surrounded by the bodies. James never specifies whether these bodies are drugged, unconscious or dead people. But their condition is clearly a result of the pressure they face in society.
A very significant scene in the film is when James portrays himself with his real name as the documentary filmmaker Michael James, who wants to make a film about these homeless groups as if he is recording his first attempt when he was discovering this community, and criticising his first impressions of those people. Simphiwe and his friends refuse to deal with him because they feel he wants to use. In fact these scenes seem to be a critique of the heartless media people who only think of others as subjects and not human beings. The core of the film is somehow about nihilist ideas, and the structure seems to evolve mainly around death and drugs, and perhaps it is to ameliorate the resulting gloom that the filmmaker tries to break the fourth wall at the end of the film by showing himself shooting a film. “I like Abbas Kiarostami’s approach,” James said, “so I tried to mimic the ending of Taste of Cherries at the end of my film.” God’s Work won the Radwan Al-Kahef’s award for young filmmakers.
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Another important film that participated in the Long Films Competition is the Egyptian film Al-Qesas (The Stories) directed by Abu Bakr Shawky and seemingly inspired by the director’s own family history. One of the storylines features Ahmed (Amir Al-Masry), a piano student who becomes pen pals with Elizabeth, a girl from Austria (Valerie Pachner), and when he travels to Austria to study piano, falls in love with her; a few years later they are married.
The filmmaker tries to tell the story of an ordinary middle-class family through the modern history of Egypt, describing all the milestones, failures, and victories achieved in Egyptian society alongside the smaller private milestones. The filmmaker chooses an absurd directorial approach to tell his story. The first scene is when Ahmed is practising playing Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto. Shawky shoots this scene using an ultra-wide lens, making it cartoonish especially when the neighbour is heard complaining about the loud piano.
The script follows Ahmed’s father (Ahmed Kamal), his paternal uncle (Sherif Al-Dessouky), his maternal uncle (Sabry Fawwaz), their friend (Osama Abdallah), and even the angry neighbour (Nagui Shehata) as they wait for Zamalek, the football team, to win the league every year, only for Zamalek to end up defeated. Shawky uses this comic metaphor to reflect on deeper defeats like the 1967 War. The only victory mentioned in the film is at the end when Ahmed manages at last to perform in front of a senior government official, perhaps Hosni Mubarak, recreating his Ministry of Agriculture clerk father’s moment with Gamal Abdel-Nasser in the 1960s.
Shawky who is also the screenwriter, creates his critical moments in parallel of what is happening on the national level. When Ahmed’s twin brother Hassan (Ahmed Al-Azaar) becomes a soldier in the armed forces, the family is relieved to receive a letter from him saying he is fine after the 1967 defeat, but following the victory of the 1973 War the family receives a letter from the armed forces saying that Hassan was killed. When the TV announces the assassination of Anwar Al-Sadat on 6 October 1981, Ahmed and his wife are at the hospital because she isn’t feeling well and Ahmed was extremely worried since his mother (Nelly Karim) passed away recently. And when Elizabeth tells him that she is pregnant and he bursts into tears, the onlookers imagine he is grieving the death of the president.
It is obvious that most of the actors tried as hard as they could to inhabit their characters, which they managed, though occasionally Nelly Karim as Ahmed’s mother, for example, slips into the comfort zone of her previous acting in the TV series A Girl Named Zat. On the other hand, the performance by actor Ahmed Kamal, who plays the father, is far from realistic and reflects the director’s vision, leaning into the absurd. The Stories, which won the Golden Tanit for best film in the 2025 Carthage Film Festival, won the best artistic contribution for cinematography at LAFF.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 9 April, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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