Film

Direction: Tamer El Said

Screenplay: Tamer El Said, Rasha Salti
Camera: Bassem Fayad
Sound Design: Victor Bresse
Sound Mixing: Mikaël Barre
Editors: Mohamed Abdel Gawad, Vartan Avakian, Barbara Bossuet
Art Direction: Salah Marei
Producers: Tamer El Said, Khalid Abdalla
Co-producers: Hana Al Bayaty, Michel Balagué, Marcin Malaszczak, Cat Villiers
Music: Amélie Legrand, Victor Moïse
Set Designer: Yasser Al-Husseini
Costume: Zeina Kiwan
Colour correction: Jorge Piquer Rodriguez
Visual Effects: Unai Rosende
With: Khalid Abdalla, Laila Samy, Hanan Youssef, Maryam Saleh, Hayder Helo, Basim Hajar, Bassem Fayad, Ali Sobhi, Islam Kamel, Mohamed Gaber, Abla Fadila

Egypt, Germany, UK, UAE
2016, 118 min.
DCP, Colour
Arab with english subtitles

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In the last days of the city

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OT: Akher ayam el madina

Downtown Cairo is an organism that still seems alive back in winter 2009/10, but is becoming increasingly alien even to those born there. Khalid is looking for a flat. He’s a filmmaker. He looks at his images over and over again, as if he were waiting from them to produce some sort of meaning. The stories of his protagonists seem to come from somewhere inside him, he seeks points of reference in the outside world. The more he looks for them, the more they seem to disappear; not abruptly though, but in lengthy moments full of tenderness, such as when he bids farewell to his girlfriend who is leaving him, to his ill mother, to friends who have come to the city to premiere their films. For them, Cairo is a fixed reference point: One left Baghdad and is now living as a refugee in Berlin, another stayed there, a third lives in troubled Beirut. When they decide to send Khalid video material from their cities, it's not so much about helping him with his film than preserving something they still associate with Cairo via this bond, fully aware that it’s already a fantasy. An almost noiseless film in which time is overtaken by history.

„In the Last Days of the City “expresses the anguish of loving impossible cities: places that batter their inhabitants with war, violence, political or religious oppression, yet keep a hold on them with beauty, memory, an ineffable sense of belonging.“
– Film comment

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