Cairo in 2009, two years before the Egyptian revolution. Khalid is a filmmaker working on a portrait of his hometown. He keeps looking at his images as if waiting for them to make sense. The stories of his protagonist*s seem to come from somewhere inside him, in the outside world he looks for points of connection, but the more he looks, the more they seem to disappear.
Not abruptly, but in moments of tenderness, he says goodbye to his girlfriend who is leaving him, to his sick mother, to friends who were in town on a visit. For them, Cairo is a fixed point: one has left Baghdad and lives as a refugee in Berlin, the other has stayed there, the third lives in troubled Beirut. When they decide to send Khalid video footage from their cities, it is less to help him with his film than to thereby maintain a connection to something they still locate in Cairo, knowing full well that it is already a phantasm.
"A fairy-tale quest for lost time while remaining entirely present, wide-awake cinema. A film that is essayistic, fictional and documentary, a film about filmmaking, an intimate self-portrait and a contemplation of the last summer before the revolution - nostalgic, sensual, wise. How do you tell the universe of a city in cinema? This film answers this question in the most convincing way: fragmentarily, with a watchful eye, surrendering to chance, and at the same time with a sophisticated art of staging. This is a film that knows its great models, whether they be Rossellini, Godard, Chris Marker or perhaps Dominik Graf - but that never slavishly depends on them. He shows indirectly and full of stylistic cunning underhand an entire region that has been much unjustly in the shadows for a long time, and is now in focus but obscured again by the clouds of stupidity and prejudice. This film is a prime example of how cinema is not about making "political films, but about making political films" (Godard). That is: commitment and artistic activism beyond the all-too-expectable." (Jury statement for the award of the Caligari Film Prize 2016)
In the Last Days of the City. Tamer el Seid, Germany/ Egypt 2016
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