Tourist With A Typewriter

When the Israeli army withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula in 1982, it built a wall along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. This split the city of Rafah in half. Today virtually nothing crosses the border. Yet through an underground network of tunnels, people smuggle everything from weapons, food supplies to medicines. The film is produced for Al-Jazeera International.

When NATO troops withdrew from Afghanistan, the Afghan National Army (ANA) took over control of Helmand Province, an extremely dangerous region where attacks by Taliban fighters are the order of the day. Security, much less peace, would seem to be unattainable; it is even difficult to find a common language in a country where everyone mistrusts each other. The directors of this film accompanied an ANA company during a year of frontline duty in Helmand. The soldiers are paid irregularly, there are not enough supplies and their equipment is substandard. They cannot fight a war with the equipment left behind by the ISAF.

Hala, an Opera singer living in Rome, comes back to Cairo to claim her mother’s inheritance. This takes her on a journey across Cairo, meeting various people and many sides of the city to resolve her grief and the memories of her mother in the rough fantastical backdrop of the city.