Last year may have seen some governments maintaining tight measures against the Covid-19 pandemic, but things were undoubtedly more relaxed here in Egypt. For the first few months there were limits on the number of people allowed in gathering spots including movie theatres, but as the vaccine was rolled out these measures were relaxed. Producers were encouraged by the box office picking up speed, with recent films like Al-Ens Wal Nems (Humans and the Mongoose) and Al-Aref (The Knower) grossing over LE50 million.

Directed by Sherif Arafa and starring Mohamed Heneidi, Menna Shalabi, Amr Abdel-Gelil and Bayoumi Fouad, Al-Ens Wal Nems is a fantastical comedy about a man who works at the horror ride of a funfair falling in love with the human daughter of a djinn family. A major figure in the new wave of comedy that started in the late 1990s, Heneidi used to make a film a year but this time he appears on the silver screen for the first time in four years.

Directed by Ahmed Alaa Al-Deeb and starring Ahmed Ezz, Ahmed Fahmi and Mahmoud Hemeida, Al-Aref is an action flick about computer programmer who collaborates with the secret service to capture a dangerous hacker. It mimics American thrillers with firearms, explosives and car chases.

But 2021 was even more fruitful for art house cinema. Omar Al-Zohairi’s Reesh (Feathers), for example, participated in almost 15 different film festivals all around the world and has received 12 prestigious awards to date, including the Critics’ Week Grand Prize and FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes, the Best Arab Film Award and Variety Awards at El Gouna Film Festival, the Best Film Award at Pingyao International Film Festival in Shanxi, China, the Special Jury Prize at Torino Film Festival in Turin, Italy, as well as four awards at the Carthage Film Festival: Best Actress (Demyana Nassar), Best Screenplay (Tahar Chriaa), the debut award and the Tanit d’Or for best film.

Feathers is a unique film unlike any other in Egyptian cinema. Al-Zohairi, who co-wrote the script with Ahmed Amer, sets his story at an unidentified place and time, though it is clearly a poor, rural-seeming area linked to a factory. Perhaps that is what the filmmaker was looking for, the intersection point of industry and poverty as a vision of dystopia with a touch of dark humour. The filmmaker exaggerates the ugliness and filth of the area where the protagonists live, showing how the smoke from the factory irrevocably dirties their living space.

The script depicts the ordinary life of a family consisting of a man who seems to be a factory worker and his wife, their two young children and newborn baby. The first few scenes show the patriarchal authority of the man, the family’s only breadwinner, who controls the money which he keeps locked up in a dirty metal tin, while his wife speaks little and never smiles. What little dialogue there is shows the man’s ridiculous comments on the milk and a small fountain he brought home on the occasion of his child’s birthday. The story takes off when, having locked that man in a wooden trunk during a birthday party, the magician appears accidentally to transform him into a chicken. The family then becomes destitute and is threatened with homelessness, and the wife has to work to fulfil the family’s basic needs even as she keeps trying to work out the mystery of her husband’s transformation. Mixing a visually rough picture with fantastical action and funny dialogue, Al-Zohairi creates a cinematic discourse on poverty wholly unlike the one traditionally practised in Egypt, which is firmly linked to realism.

Ayten Amin’s second feature narrative Souad had been in the official selection of the 2020 Cannes – cancelled due to Civid-19 – and managed to participate in the Berlinale Panorama, the Prague International Film Festival, the Montpellier Mediterranean Film Festival and the Tribeca Film Festival where it won the Best Actress Award (which went to both Bassant Ahmed and Basmala Elghaiesh).

Combining documentary and narrative techniques, the film shows how its 19-year-old protagonist Souad manages to resist her conservative religious community in the Nile Delta city of Zagazig not by confronting it but by adopting multiple personalities among friends and on social media. Souad and her younger sister end up in grave trouble as a result.

Mohamed Diab’s Amira too screened at five prestigious film festivals including Venice and Chicago. Though by an Egyptian director, Amira is a Palestinian story set in Palestine and performed by Palestinian actors. Written by Diab, it is the story of how the daughter of a Palestinian prisoner conceived through in vitro fertilisation (IVF) with sperm smuggled out of an Israeli prison turns out tragically to be the daughter of an Israeli guard when it is discovered that said prisoner – a hero of his community – is actually infertile. At first the wife is accused of infidelity and Amira goes through hell. It is melodramatic and outlandish, but sperm smuggling in the Occupied Territories is a real issue that has been covered by the press, and it is a way into the question of identity and nature vs nurture.

Due to its sensitive topic which was deemed a form of normalisation with Israel, a social media campaign led to Jordan’s Royal Film Commission withdrawing the film from the 2022 race of the Academy Award for best foreign film. Diab responded on Facebook: “The film deals with the suffering and heroism of the prisoners and their families. Choosing a dramatic plot involving the sperm being replaced was intended to raise an existential and philosophical question about the essence of human belief and whether someone would make the same choices if they were born to another person. Amira, the protagonist, chooses to be Palestinian… The film denounces and condemns the occupation practices openly.” He also said the film will not be screened in the theatres until it is seen and discussed by a delegation of the Palestinian prisoners’ families.

A rather more disturbing fact is that not only viewers but intellectuals and artists now lead censorial campaigns targeting freedom of expression. When actor Sherif Mounir accused Al-Zohairi of defaming Egypt by deliberately focusing on poverty and ignoring the government’s achievements in eradicating shanty towns in Feathers during El Gouna Film Festival, many filmmakers, actors and critics expressed their support for Al-Zohairi while an aggressive social media debate about patriotism and freedom of expression saw some people calling on the government to ban the film and even to end the festival itself – before the Decent Life initiative launched by President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi in 2019 announced its support for freedom of expression, cutting short the sycophantic and hypocritical hate speech.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 23 December, 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.