Muhammad Hamdy’s debut feature is what you might call an Egyptian stoner flick – if Cheech and Chong were a pair of exhausted, poetry-spouting revolutionaries roaming a broken-down necropolis. Hashish is the means of dulling painful memories and, apparently, preventing subcutaneous eruptions of mint, in this distinctive and stubborn-headed post-Arab-Spring reckoning which comes with magic-realist overtones.
Bahaa (Alaa El Din Hamada) is a disaffected doctor who, on hearing a woman’s complaint about being unable to stop her dead son manifesting, passes her a joint. Wandering through a set of decrepit apartments in a becalmed nocturnal purgatory, pursued by sprinting shadows and bemoaning his lost love Dalal, it seems he and his friend Mahdy (Mahdy Abo Bahat) have joined the ranks of the ghosts themselves. These ruins are psychological as much as anything: their dealer, a former Black Block activist, laments the failed revolution. Another acquaintance laments the 171 bullets that ended his life. There is much lamentation.
