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In the Last Days of the City (Akher ayam el madina)
Drama, Art House & International
Downtown Cairo is an organism that still seems alive back in winter 2009/10, but is becoming increasingly alien even to those born there. Khalid is looking for a flat. He's a filmmaker. He looks at his images over and over again, as if he were waiting from them to produce some sort of meaning. The stories of his protagonists seem to come from somewhere inside him, he seeks points of reference in the outside world. The more he looks for them, the more they seem to disappear; not abruptly though, but in lengthy moments full of tenderness, such as when he bids farewell to his girlfriend who is leaving him, to his ill mother, to friends who have come to the city to premiere their films. For them, Cairo is a fixed reference point: One left Baghdad and is now living as a refugee in Berlin, another stayed there, a third lives in troubled Beirut. When they decide to send Khalid video material from their cities, it's not so much about helping him with his film than preserving something they still associate with Cairo via this bond, fully aware that it's already a fantasy. An almost noiseless film in which time is overtaken by history.
Rating
NR
Director
Tamer el Said
Studio
Big World Pictures
Writer
Tamer el Said, Rasha Salti
- In the Last Days of the City is beautifully rendered, capturing at once the energy of Cairo, and also its particular, defining light-grainy and filtered, much like faded Kodak photographs from the Eighties.Reply
- But the din that erupts from the logjam-creative, psychic, historical, national-is nothing if not honest.Reply
- The film is a challenging watch, and it's hard to amply describe its pleasures in words - its poignancy is in a deep affiliation with the life of a crumbling urban centre.Reply
- The result is a city requiem rather than a city symphony, a plangent, multi-layered dirge to the sensory overload of the capital, and as such will be best appreciated by those who know the city.Reply
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- It's a work of gentle, swelling sadness that mourns a spirit of artistic and creative freedom quashed ...Reply
- Flirting with pretension and needless structural chicanery, this vibrant portrait of Cairo on the cusp of the Arab Spring is saved by the director's obvious affection for the city, and by the eerie sense of visiting a now-vanished place.Reply
- The knowledge of the upheavals that Egypt has experienced in the intervening years only adds to the poignancy here.Reply
- It's a melancholy, interesting film, slightly opaque, a cine-journal about the way youth is clouded by experience.Reply