Egypt has selected Souad to represent it in the Oscar race for best international film in a foreign language.
The movie, directed by Ayten Amin, depicts the life of teenage girls in Egypt in the era of social media.
Souad is Amin’s second feature-length experience after her movie Villa 69, which was released in 2013.
Souad participated in the virtual session of the Cannes Film Festival in 2020, and then in the Panorama section of the Berlin Festival in 2021. It is scheduled to be released for public in December.
Amin’s picture, which was filmed in real locations and homes, brings to the big screen a dreamy life of a teenage girl with two different characters, a real one in life and a virtual one on the social media.
With vivid camera positions, the director filmed the opening scene showing Souad as a girl sitting next to a middle-aged woman in a bus. In a brief conversation, Souad tells the other woman about her fiancé, a doctor who serves in Sinai, showing how strong her relationship with him and his sister are.
The director cut the same scene to show another woman sitting next to Souad. In the scene, Souad speaks about the interference of her fiancé’s sister in their lives. She narrates that her finance’s sister, in her thirties and still single, has nothing to do, but to hassle with them.
In another cut, we see Souad meeting her real sister, Rabab, and making up another story to justify why she is late.
In the first few minutes Souad, 19, tells three different stories which reveal her character of being a dreamy person who lives in an imaginable world that she created in her mind.
Few minutes later, we discover the real story of Souad, who appears to be quiet, shy and even weak among her friends. She wears hijab (veil covering the hair) in her daily life. However, she appears without veil on the social media.
On the contrary, her younger sister Rabab is not as romantic as she. Rabab is more open-minded and even a bit bold.
Rabab travels to Souad’s lover, Ahmed, claiming that she has a message from Souad to him. She spent all day with him to know more about her sister’s secret life. Gradually we knew about Ahmed’s character who is a social media influencer, living in Alexandria, which is a city of dreams for the two girls who dwell in a village in the Nile Delta.
Dramatically, the film develops smoothly with the reactions of the three characters. The movie may be deemed as a documentary for a number of reasons. First, this was clearly noticeable in the girls’ messy bedrooms. Moreover, the short dialogues — between the sisters about how to be sexy, and how to wear makeup – were similar a documentary.
For over half a century, the Egyptian filmmakers failed in reaching the Oscar finals. Two feature movies represented Egypt in the Oscar race for the best international feature film award in more than 60 years ago. Youssef Chahine’s “Bab al-Hadid” (Cairo Station) and Henry Barakat’s “Doaa al-Karawan” (The Nightingale’s Prayer) were nominated for the Oscar in 1958 and 1959 respectively.
Amin’s Souad eclipsed a number of Egyptian films such as Captains of Zaatari, which was directed by Ali el-Arabi in 2020, and Mai Zayed’s Lift Like a Girl to race for the Oscar.
Each country nominates a film to represent it in the Oscar’s best foreign language film. The shortlist will be announced in December and the final list will be announced in February. The 94th Academy Awards are scheduled for March 27, 2022, in Los Angeles.
