Shofha

The Stories is a decades-spanning Egyptian family saga and love story set between the late 1960s and 1980s. The film follows Ahmed, a young man from a modest Cairo family who dreams of becoming a concert pianist. During the tense summer of 1967, as war looms over Egypt, he begins a pen-pal correspondence with an Austrian woman named Elizabeth (“Liz”). A semi-autobiographical film based on the director's parents and how they met.

On Issa's thirty-sixth birthday, after a desperate fight with life that resulted in a crushing defeat, he receives a gift from the last person he expected. A gift that forces him to change every detail of his life. Because he has lost his passion for life and has long been lost to himself, he is forced to follow this new path, undergoing one experience after another, hoping to find what he has lost. As he does so, his current reality battles him; he discovers that he must confront his worst fears. A novel about a different kind of love, about passion, and about the fear that prevents him from feeling alive.