Amal

“One day, there will be a revolution in Egypt. Do what you want, don’t be afraid.” A confidence from a father to his daughter, before dying without having seen the waves of “Arab Springs” unfurl upon his country. Amal, the heir to this paternal prophecy, was too young to demonstrate in 2011. With all the spirit of her 15 years, she nonetheless wormed her way into the very masculine world of the “ultras” of Cairo, who continued the fight in the name of an unfinished liberation that was already dearly paid for. It was during this period that Mohamed Siam met and filmed her, over six years, in the “post-Tahrir Square” turbulence and the first disillusionments of the Morsi era, followed by General Sissi’s counter-revolutionary coup d'état. A real documentary initiatory novel, Amal is devoted to the parabolic trajectory of a teenager towards adulthood, and captures her successive transformations like a metaphorical body: that of an entire society, still in search of its hard-to-find emancipation from old patriarchal structures whose foundations seem to have been hardly shaken.

Emmanuel Chicon

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