Hassala Films

When a day in the life of a beleaguered Egyptian filmmaker goes sideways, he witnesses anew issues like class and gender relations.

After a man dies in a fatal accident at work, the only compensation offered to the family is the chance for his two sons, Hossam (23) and Maro (12), to be employed in the same factory, side by side with the man responsible for their father’s death.

One day in the life of Soad, who lives with her mother and bed-ridden father on the outskirts of Cairo.

Mohammed, the son of a simple worker, lives in the city of Alexandria with his father and dreams of moving to Cairo to become a filmmaker. In Cairo, Mohammed meets Salma and Bassam and is impressed by their self-confidence. When he discovers that Salma and Bassam’s parents were left-wing activists from the 1970s, he looks for a similar sense of purpose in his own father’s life. As he compares lives, Mohammed the filmmaker discovers answers. More importantly, he is led to new questions that connect the past with the present.

Iraqi theater director Mohsen Sadoon Yasin has spent much of his life in involuntary exile. His daughter, Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez, has constructed a loving film portrait of her father, and an elegy for a homeland to which they can never return—partly because it has changed so much, and partly because it was perhaps always more a concept than a reality.