IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE CITY Includes reception and Q&A with Director Tamer El Said

Showings

Cinema Arts Centre - Cinema 2 Thu, Apr 26, 2018 7:30 PM

Description

International Cinema

Akher ayam el madina
IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE CITY


Thursday, April 26 at 7:30 pm | Members $11 | Public $16
Includes reception and Q&A with Director Tamer El Said

Downtown Cairo, 2009. Khalid, a 35 year old fi lmmaker is struggling to make a film that captures the soul of his city while facing loss in his own life. With the help of his friends, who send him footage from their lives in Beirut, Baghdad and Berlin, he finds the strength to keep going through the diffi culty and beauty of living.

This film within a film is a haunting yet lyric chronicle of recent years in the Arab world, where revolutions seemed to spark hope for change and yield further instability in one stroke. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Khalid Abdalla (The Kite Runner, The Square) plays the protagonist of Tamer El Said’s ambitious feature debut, a filmmaker in Cairo attempting to capture the zeitgeist of his city as the world changes around him—from personal love and loss to the fall of the Mubarak regime.
Throughout, friends send footage and stories from Berlin, Baghdad, and Beirut, creating a powerful, multilayered meditation on togetherness, the tactile hold of cities, and the meaning of homeland. Shot in 2008 and completed this year, the film explores the weight of the cinematic image as record and storytelling in an ongoing time of change. (Egypt/Germany/UK/United Arab Emirates, 2016, 118 min, Arabic with English subtitles | Dir. Tamer El Said)