‘The reality is worse’: can TV drama end legal woes of Egypt’s bereaved?

Aly Hegazy, 20, with his mother Eman Helal, 48, in their house in Cairo. ‘Nobody understands what it’s like unless they’ve been through it,’ she says. Photograph: Jonathan Rashad/The Guardian

The day before Aly Hegazy graduated from high school in June 2020, his father died from cancer after a long illness. The grief of losing him was compounded by the realisation that, without his father’s signature, he would be unable to go to university.

Under Egyptian law, responsibility for Hegazy, who was 17 at the time, and his younger brother fell not to his mother but to his 90-year-old grandfather, who had dementia.