Bassam Mortada, Egypte, 2024
SYNOPSIS
Bassam Mortada was five years old when he first visited father Mahmoud in the notorious Abo Zaabal prison. With the police raid still fresh in his mind, his experience was dominated by incomprehension. But in the years that followed, resentment took hold. Bassam was raised by his mother Fardous, a socialist activist herself. As a single parent, her life was hard, and when Mahmoud was finally released from prison he seemed like different person. He left for Vienna, and for a second time she was left behind, this time embittered. Bassam grew alienated from both, suppressing his own trauma and confusion. In this documentary, he films his efforts to renew and restor relationships with his parents and find a path to historica truth, emotional comprehension and psychological healing, as he tries to reconstruct how his parents’ political activism has shaped their family. Through conversations with his parents and their friends, the cassette tapes his father sent from Vienna, a theatrical monologue by his father’s best friend, newspaper archives and found footage, he shows the impact of the “big” history of Egypt on the “small” history of his family.
BIOFILMOGRAPHY
Bassam Mortada is a director, producer and activist. He is also a co-founder of See media production. He studied Independent filmmaking at the Jesuite Cairo Cinema School. As an independent filmmaker, Mortada worked with a number of independent institutions, NGOs, activists, to help document their life, struggle and work. In 2008, Mortada joined Al-Masry Media Corporation as a creative producer and director where he helped set up the first independent Web-documentary TV in Egypt. He trained many journalists and managed to create a team of young video journalists, who broke grounds in the area of video journalism and produced many stories that went viral. His first feature documentary ‘Reporting…a Revolution’ in 2012 was about these journalists. It premiered in the Berlinale film festival in Berlin 2012 and toured many festivals worldwide. Mortada then moved to start his own independent production See Media Production with producers Kesmat EL Sayed to focus on developing his creative feature documentary “Abo Zabaal prison 1989” and support others. Since then he has also directed three short documentaries, one of which “Waiting for his Descent” won the first prize for documentary at the Jesuite film festival. “Searching for Ghazala” which premiered at the Cairo International film festival.