Maha Maamoun
2021Night Visitor: The Night of Counting the Years
Maha Maamoun
Historically, the term ‘Night Visitor’ referred to undercover police investigators who would attack houses and arrest political activists under the darkness of night. On this occasion, the roles are reversed, and the hunted become the hunters. The video uses material that documents the 2011 Egyptian revolution, shot by the protagonists while storming the state security offices and later posted on the internet.
Night Visitor: The Night of Counting the Years
عزيزي الحيوان
Maha Maamoun
Shot between Cairo and different locations in India, Dear Animal weaves together the short story Lord of the Order of Existence about a drug dealer who turns into a strange animal by writer Haytham El-Wardany and a selection of notes written and posted on Facebook by Azza Shaaban, a director-producer who left Egypt in 2013 and now lives in India. Her letters talk about her travels and the long healing process after the Egyptian revolution. At once occupying disparate levels of time and space, Dear Animal is a meditation on our relationship to power, violence, and the unfamiliar.
Dear Animal
2026
Maha Maamoun
Ahmed Kamal
Based on a text from the recent Egyptian novel The Revolution of 2053 by Mahmoud Uthman, and referencing a scene from Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), a time-traveller recounts his vision of the future of the Pyramids area, and by extension Egypt, in the year 2026 – a vision that strains to reach beyond, yet remains severely confined by the present’s imaginal constraints.
2026
Domestic Tourism II
Maha Maamoun
Exclusively utilizing footage from other Egyptian films that use the pyramids as backdrop, Domestic Tourism II explores the ways in which these iconic historical monuments can be reappropriated from the “timelessness” of the tourist postcard and reinscribed into the complex political, social, and historical moment in urban narratives.
Domestic Tourism II