Cairo Year Zero (2014) Online
In the culminating months before the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, four young friends spend a casual evening roaming their native Cairo before an unexpected altercation fatefully transforms one of them into an unlikely revolutionary symbol. A social coming-of-age drama / comedy in the neorealist tradition about the dark side of revolt and the last moments of young adulthood, shot on location guerrilla-style by two blokes from Greece and Egypt constantly on the lookout for cops seeking to confiscate their cameras.
| Credited cast: | |||
 | Hana Afifi | - | Zahra |
 | Nezar Alderazi | - | Hazem |
| Walid El-Nahal | - | Walid |
| Moustafa Khalil | - | Saleem |
| Omar Madkour | - | Malek |
The main storyline unfolds over the course of one evening. With the exception of the rooftop scene, which was filmed the night before, the single evening in the film was filmed in a single evening in real life. Due to the busy rehearsal schedule of Khalil, Alderazi and Madkour for a play at the American University of Cairo, which was being documented by Volonakis for use in a promotional trailer for the upcoming performance, their only window for principle photography was their weekend off. The establishing morning shots of Cairo were filmed immediately after the shoot with the actors had wrapped, and Volonakis rushed to board his plane to Athens a few hours afterwards.
Unlike the unnamed character he portrayed as a cameo in the brief Athens segment, who casually disappears into the shadows, director Niko Volonakis was beaten up by the police shown on screen less than an hour after completing photography, along with dozens of other patrons at a café in Exarcheia square in Athens. The incident, which transpired after an antifascist march on November 17th 2013, the 40th anniversary of the Athens Polytechnic uprising, was documented by Volonakis and released online to assist several tourists and restaurant owners in their attempts to file an official brutality complaint to the city. The video quickly reached over a hundred thousand views and caused Volonakis to receive a myriad of poorly-spelled death threats from anonymous Golden Dawn supporters.
Cairo Year Zero is a short extract from Volonakis and Medhat's feature, Hate Your City, a film three years in the making. In late 2013, when their budget to complete the feature ran out, the two decided to restructure the subplot as its own self-contained narrative and send it to festivals. The short now serves as a standalone prequel to the feature. It is uncertain whether Hate Your City will contain flashbacks to the events of Cairo Year Zero, as it did in the original script, or if they will merely be referenced in character exposition.
The majority of the dialogue and events in the film are directly inspired by the real-life overseas exchanges of Volonakis and Medhat. After making numerous shorts together in film school, Medhat returned to Egypt at the onset of the 2011 uprising. He and Volonakis Skyped regularly and drafted up their first outline in the early months of the revolution. Volonakis went to Cairo to visit his friend and shoot their film later that summer.
The names of all original songs by Gentleman Lugosi (alias Niko Volonakis) are direct references to the original television series Doctor Who (1963-1989). The Fourth Doctor's (Tom Baker) quote "Have I that right?" is faintly heard in the beginning of the film as the camera pans up to reveal Saleem (Moustafa Khalil), referencing the moral dilemma of dissidents of whether to commit insurrectionary violence to circumvent greater, oppressive violence, and is taken from the 1975 serial "Genesis of the Daleks".
Before the characters walk off to get into their car to take Saleem to a brothel/cabaret establishment, an off-screen voice is heard on a motorbike yelling, prompting Saleem to turn his head. This is a sample of a passerby who deliberately interrupted the shoot of a later scene, who had Greek obscenities hurled at him by Volonakis. The voice was re-inserted as an inside joke in post-production by Volonakis, who later claimed it served as a reminder to never lose his cool again, as his temper nearly sabotaged the shoot, not the brief interference.
Taher Medhat's uncredited character Sherif routinely disappears in the background of shots he was previously in, such as the rooftop and the balloon drinking game. As cinematographer, assistant director, producer and occasional sound recordist, it was obvious from the beginning that the continuity of the inclusion of his character would suffer greatly due to his multiple production duties, so the inconsistency was left in the final edit and simply attributed to the "mysterious nature" of the character.
The entire original script was scrapped when Niko Volonakis became more personally acquainted with lead actors Nezar Alderazi and Moustafa Khalil. The conflict in the early screenplay, which featured a non-devout Coptic Christian coming to terms with his close friend's increasingly militant interest in Islam and the religious rivalry imposed upon the two, was re-imagined entirely into a more minimalistic tale driven by characters inspired by Alderazi and Khalil's real-life personas.
Winner of "Best Narrative Short" at Reel Independent Film Extravaganza 2014 in Washington D.C.
Winner of the Excellence Award at the 2015 Rincón International Film Festival of Puerto Rico.
User reviews