The halos and horrors of silver screen motherhood

Motherhood in Egyptian drama has long held a near-sacred status. The mother is the heart that absorbs hardship and the shoulder that keeps the family standing—a candle that burns for others, as the saying goes. She sacrifices her own desires and wears down her health so “the family” can endure, becoming not just a character but a moral emblem.

This Ramadan, that image shifted. The mother sometimes appears as the source of conflict, someone who causes harm, knowingly or not. But that shift does not necessarily make her more layered or more human—though that is badly needed. Instead, it simply swaps one model for another: the self-sacrificing mother gives way to the selfish or criminal one, as if drama knows only extremes—saint or villain—while any textured reality disappears.

Divorce as a maternal sin

In this context, several series present a version of the “criminal mother” not through overt wrongdoing but through the act of separation. Seeking divorce is no longer treated as a right or an end to an unhappy marriage, but as the direct cause of family collapse and children’s misery.

This is clear in “Once Upon a Time,” where the mother (Yousra El-Lozy) is portrayed as selfish, seeking divorce to escape a stagnant life. The narrative denies her choice legitimacy: she finds no happiness, becomes entangled with exploitative men, and her divorce destabilizes her daughter and deepens her unhappiness.

In “Mom and Dad Are Neighbors,” the same pattern returns in a seemingly lighter form, though it is no less telling. The mother (Mirna Gamil), chooses divorce to focus on her artistic future, a choice the series frames as a personal whim made at the expense of family stability.

In “A Father, But,” meanwhile, the mother (Hagar Ahmed) cannot adapt to the daily demands of motherhood. She cannot take care of herself or her home, or manage the responsibilities of family life, so divorce becomes a mark of failure.

What binds these characters is not only that they are mothers who chose to end a marriage. It is that the drama frames this choice as the root of the problem: the family falls apart, the children suffer and chaos takes over, all of it tied to the mother’s actions.

These works do not unpack motherhood or its contradictions. Divorce is treated as an original sin triggering a chain of disasters. The deeper problem is the flattened writing, even in works by women—“Once Upon a Time” by Sherine Diab and “A Father, But” by Yasmine Kamel (screenplay by Marian Hany). The mothers’ crises feel contrived and superficial, lacking realism or dramatic conviction.

These series do not challenge the mythology of motherhood or acknowledge its tensions, settling instead for a stark binary: the self-sacrificing mother or the destructive one—two extremes far removed from real-life complexity.

Mommie Dearest

Alongside the incriminated mother, this year’s Ramadan drama also revives the figure of the mother-in-law, or grandmother, as the hidden force driving family conflict—a type that last century’s Egyptian cinema exhausted in every conceivable form, as though these characters had been lifted from another era without any new context. Women of the older generation are overtaken by the role of the domineering mother-in-law who ruins her children’s lives in place of the tender mother as in “My Mother-in-Law is an Angel,” “The Glamorous Mothers-in-Law” and “The Apartment Belongs to the Wife.”

The mother-in-law again appears as inherently evil, stoking marital conflict without motive. These dramas reduce her to two stock figures: the kind elder or the wicked witch, with no nuance.

In “Once Upon a Time,” the grandmother (Hanan Youssef) drives post-divorce conflict, acting as a catalyst for legal and financial disputes and even seeking to exploit the ex-husband.

The same pattern appears in “Samir Esq.”: another grandmother engineers the marriage’s collapse, welcomes the divorce, and leads the legal battle, while the daughter remains passive, her will subsumed by her mother’s.

Once again, evil appears as destiny, without the narrative offering any history or motive that might explain this insistence on escalation.

The evil witch

The bluntest form of this stereotype appears in “A Father, But,” where the grandmother is a cartoonishly evil figure manipulating her granddaughter against her father. The series even depicts her as a near witch, reducing her to a simplistic children’s-tale divide between good and evil.

Contrasting it with “Nargis’ Tale” shows the problem is not simply the presence of harsh or even villainous women within family portrayals. The series itself offers abrasive models, beginning with Nargis (Riham Abdel Ghafour), whose personal crisis drives her as far as kidnapping children, and extending to the grandmother Souad, a severe woman who openly resents having daughters instead of a son and treats them with cruelty.

But Souad’s harshness is rooted in a clear social and psychological context. She belongs to a generation shaped by a system that prized sons as a woman’s highest achievement, and from this framework her views of her daughters and motherhood emerge. The series does not justify her actions so much as render them legible, turning her from a symbol of evil into a character whose contradictions can be understood.

The problem, then, is not demonization but typification. When a villain is reduced to a mere plot device, evil becomes cliché—unlike when cruelty is woven into a more complex story about family power and the social pressures that shape women’s behavior.

These works expose a crisis in writing female characters and a deeper confusion about motherhood. Between the self-sacrificing and the selfish mother, the image of a mother as a human being—with desires, limits, and flaws—disappears, leaving Ramadan drama unable to portray an ordinary mother.