Egypt s Souad to Premiere at New York s Tribeca Film Festival
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Egypt s Souad to Premiere at New York s Tribeca Film Festival
cairoscene.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from cairoscene.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Souad Review: Religious Conservatism Clashes With Social Media in Egyptian Drama Souad Review: Religious Conservatism Clashes With Social Media in Egyptian Drama
A vibrant young woman north of Cairo is trapped between conflicting modes of comportment, with religion on one side and social media on the other.
Jay Weissberg, provided by
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Director: Ayten Amin
With: Bassant Ahmed, Basmala Elghaiesh, Hussein Ghanem, Hager Mahmoud, Sarah Shedid, Carol Ackad, Mona Elnamoury, Islam Shalaby, Nayera El Dahshoury. (Arabic dialogue)
Running time: Running time: 98 MIN.
Courtesy of Berlin Film Festival
There are two gods in “Souad,” Allah and smart phones, but in a battle between the two it’s clear who’ll be the winner. Ayten Amin’s bold second feature is brilliantly alive to the contradictions of teenage life in conservative Egypt, where the pressures of social media clash with traditional religious strictures, leading to schizophrenic lives of acute une
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Up to now, few Egyptian features have received quite this kind of major festival spotlight, and beyond Amin’s engaging filmmaking style and flair with actors (most of the cast members are non-professionals),
Souad unveils a whole world as well as, crucially, a young female-centered perspective that are worth discovering for the first time. That world is of course rife with the challenges of being a young woman in a majority Islamic country, but it is also subjected to the distorting effects of social media, a topic examined in great damning detail here.