Farsh wa Ghata (2013) Online

I loved this movie, saw it as part of the London Film Festival.

It's a tragic yet tender look at life during the Egyptian revolution with exceptional direction and camera-work. It focuses on one character as he lives almost as an urban nomad, going from place to place trying to get footage on his phone of what's actually happening during the riots to a news station. It's not concerned with the what and how of the revolution but how people's lives are in uncertainty.

An interesting directorial choice is while it's focused on one character, it's mostly dialog-free. He only gets one or two lines. Other characters speak but there's selective mutism on the protagonist. If there's a scene of him talking, you can hear just the ambiance or his speaking is drowned out by the loud noise of a motorbike, so you can only infer from his actions. It succeeds unlike in other similar films using this choice, because you get much more to work with such as the more realistic performances and handling of tense subject matter.

So the film is carried by Asser Yassin's subtle and powerful performance, the meditative atmospheric electronic/guitar music by Mahmoud Hamdy (and can be heard in the trailer), and the steadicam cinematography by Tarek Hefny. I would have expected some more guerrilla shaky camera-work for a revolution-set film (it's only at the very ending) but here the steadicam gives it a quiet calm of the storm feeling. It was also cool to notice the symbolism of the movie's title as drapes in the foreground obscuring two main characters having a smoke break.

I hope for more films about the Arab revolution. It was quite a challenge for a mostly dialog-free art-house movie to come out of Egypt and I hope these kind of realistic movies get an audience.

A thought-provoking and sometimes beautiful work set at the start of the Egyptian revolution in 2011. Our nameless protagonist is one of the many who were mysteriously freed from prisons just before Mubarek left power.

He enters a nightmare world of shadows and violence, with the poor trapped between numerous warring factions. He finds himself on a quest to somehow broadcast his cell phone video of the chaos (in this case the shooting of a friend) that is consuming his country, so people will know what happened. He doesn't know who to trust, where to turn.

Film-maker Abdalla takes an unusual approach to this not unfamiliar set up. While the opening of the film, and one or two other brief sequences are shot in the 'shakey-cam', hand held style we've become used to for films about a time of violence and uncertainty, most of the film is beautifully and deliberately framed. The use of light is also special, with a number of scenes shot at gorgeous magic hour, or with what look like real street-lights turning mountains of garbage into a surreal and somehow beautiful landscapes.

The film has very little dialogue, preferring to tell it's story in images. And so, in taking a sort of tone-poem approach Abdalla does two things. On one hand he creates a slightly distanced feel. The heat of the inherently dramatic situation is cooled by the lovely silhouetted shots, and slow pace. But, for me, that was more than offset by what the style added – a kind of universality that few films made in the heat of recent real events have. There's a feeling that, for all the specific cultural markers, in its dream like, slow-motion fearfulness this could be anywhere, anytime that people are lost and torn between the threat of immanent death, and their need to share the truth with the world.

The film is great ... Screenplay is strong despite the lack of dialogue located.

distinct Filming and out of the box. The montage standing Mistake are not going to go unnoticed and a single one, but I noticed ... the events of the film revolve in the first few months of 2011 and in this period was the patriarch of the Orthodox Church is Pope Shenouda III, he had not died in that period Scene of the church in the background vocal melody deacons mentions the name of the pope Taodharos who took over the church after the events of the film more than a year

This film is worth more than a prize