This evening at 7.30 p.m., Casa Árabe in Madrid begins a film series dedicated to contemporary Arab women directors, which it is organising in collaboration with the Cine Por Mujeres Festival. The first screening is the Egyptian documentary On the Fence, by Nesrine Lotfy Elzayat. Screening in original version with Spanish subtitles (VOSE).
The film follows Nesrine’s journey back and forth between Cairo, where she currently lives with her mother, and Timma, her hometown where she spent her childhood and where her father was buried, in search of the old family home that is about to collapse. In Timma, a small town in Upper Egypt, 1,000 km from Cairo, she is forced to cover her head with a headscarf and act according to the norms of conservative society. In order to preserve the memory of her father, she rebels against the idea of having to sell the house and tries to clean and renovate it. During the cleaning she finds tapes recorded by her father, notes written by his hand and a whole accumulation of memories that lead Nesrine on an inner journey.
