EXT. Night
+Closing Film
+Egypt in Focus
Sunday, 9/29
7:30 p.m.
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EXT. Night
ليل/خارجي
Ahmad Abdalla
Narrative feature
98 mins | 2018
Egypt, UAE
Arabic with English subtitles
Minnesota premiere
Marginalized film director Moe spends an unplanned evening with two companions, taxi driver Mustafa and prostitute Toutou, who live about a metro stop away from him, yet who seem socioeconomic worlds apart from the career frustrated director. EXT. Night tackles class and gender disparities among the three by exploring and exposing their Cairo with a rawness and grit unusual to both Egyptian films and “festival films.” A comedy of errors meets a picaresque in EXT. Night whose most important character is a city mean when dark, luring its residents out of their shelters into its bustling streets, testing their wits and wiles and reminding them who is boss.
– Mohannad Ghawanmeh
Festivals and Awards:
Contemporary World Cinema Section, Toronto International Film Festival, Canada, 2018
Best Actor Award – Sherif Desouky as Mostafa, Cairo International Film Festival, Egypt, 2018
Seattle International Film Festival, US, 2019
Ahmad Abdalla is a filmmaker from Cairo, Egypt. He graduated with a degree in music and shifted his career to film editing in 2003. Abdalla has directed several feature films, including Rags & Tatters (2013), which screened at Mizna’s 2014 Arab Film Fest, Microphone (2010), which was selected among the best one hundred Arab films in history by Dubai Film Festival, and Heliopolis (2009), one of the first independent Egyptian films to be released theatrically in Egypt.
****
Necessity Has No Law
للضرورة أحكام
Ahmed Hamed
Short
2017 | 6 mins
Egypt
Arabic with English subtitles
Minnesota Premiere
Most children have dreams and ambitions. Gamal does not. This boy from a small city in Egypt doesn’t have plans for or even ideas about his future. This is a day in the life of Gamal—a child who began his life as a worker in a brick factory and will likely never leave the same hard profession.
Festivals and Awards:
Cinedelta Documentary Film Festival, Egypt, 2017
Berlin Student Film Festival, Germany, 2017
BBC Arabic Film Festival, UK, 2018
Ahmed Hamed is an Egyptian actor and director. In 2015, Hamed graduated with a bachelor of arts from the Department of Theatre Acting and Directing at Helwan University. He currently studies cinematography and film directing at the Higher Institute of Cinema in Cairo.
