Actor: Menha Batraoui

Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story

Heba is a TV presenter interested in broadcasting stories that touch on the everyday secret lives of women and the social injustices they face. Her frank style in broadcasting puts her husband's job and consequently her marriage in jeopardy.

The Emigrant

The biblical tale of Joseph is told from an Egyptian perspective in this interesting character study. In this film, Joseph is called Ram. Ram, tired of his family's backward superstitious life, and tired of being picked on by his brothers, wants to go to Egypt to study agriculture. His brothers travel with him across Sinai, but then suddenly sell him to Ozir, an Egyptian who works for a Theban military leader, Amihar. Amihar is impressed by Ram's drive and personal charm and so grants Ram some desolate land outside the capital. Ram soon finds himself a pawn in the political and sexual games between Amihar and his wife Simihit, a high priestess of the Cult of Amun.

Alexandria Again and Forever

Set in 1987 against the backdrop of a hunger strike by the Egyptian film industry, Chahine himself steps in to play Yehia, the famed Egyptian director whose life is chronicled in "Alexandria, Why?" and "An Egyptian Story". Obsessed with Amr, the handsome actor he discovered and cast as his alter-ego in parts one and two of The Alexandria Trilogy, Yehia pressures Amr to star in various film projects that change even as Yehia's perception of the young actor begins to change. He first casts Amr as Hamlet, which the actor deems too demanding for his talents, then as the lead in a musical biopic of demigod Alexander the Great, who founded the city of Alexandria in 332 B.C.

The Aquarium

Youssef is a hotshot anesthesiologist who often sleeps in his car for privacy. Laila is the careerist host of a late night radio call-in show. These two members of Cairo's elite, lost souls traveling parallel paths of longing and disconnection, are the principal fish in Yousry Nasrallah's The Aquarium, a meditation on the intellectual capital of the Middle East, now bent under the sway of repression in all its forms.

Cactus Flower

Struggling actress and bourgeois lady suddenly find themselves on the streets of hyper-tense Cairo.

19B

In a dilapidated villa, lives an old doorman who watches the villa since the sixties of the last century, so it becomes his private world. But all of a sudden his stability is threatened by a young park attendant who wants to break into his private space, forcing him to face his fears. so now the doorman finds himself in an unexpected confrontation in which he rediscovers himself again.

The City

Ali, an aspiring actor, works in a government-aided butchery and takes part in a cheap play. Defying his father's wishes, he moves to Paris to fulfill his dreams and starts living illegally alongside many other Arabs. Ali has a life-changing experience there that he won't fully remember until he returns to Egypt.

Mercedes

Nubi, a wealthy man with Communist ties, sets out to find his half-brother Gamal, who has been disowned for being gay, to let him inherit his father's fortune. In the process, Nubi is supposed to kill Gamal's stepmother Raifa, a suspected drug dealer, before she can kill his half-brother.

Summer Thefts

Set in the summer of 1961 during President Nasser's land reforms, this is a story of the childhood friendship between Yasser, the son of a bourgeois landowner, and Leil, the son of an Egyptian peasant. When turbulent times tear Yasser's family apart, the boys team up for a money-making scheme that results in misadventures.

East of Noon

Set in a confined world outside time, East of Noon is the fable of prodigy Abdo (19) who uses music to rebel against his elders: showman Shawky (70), an eccentric showman who rules with a mix of performance and fear, and storyteller Jalala (75), who provides relief with stories of the Sea, which no one else has seen. East of Noon is a satire on the inner workings of an ailing autocracy and its inherent vulnerability to youth’s unchained vision of a better world.