Letters across the water: “Stories” of a family that could be ours
I almost skipped “Al-Qisas” (Stories). The poster put me off, and so did a couple of the actors, whose earlier work had never quite won me over. What kept the film on my list was one name: Abu Bakr Shawky. His body of work has a shape you rarely find in Arab cinema, one that keeps circling back to the people history tends to leave out.
That’s been true since his first feature, “Yomeddine” (2018), about a man recovering from leprosy who crosses Egypt with an orphaned Nubian boy, both of them in search of family and a place to belong. It held again in “Hajjan” (2023), which follows an orphaned boy trying to make a name for himself in the world of camel racing, up against a system built on tribalism and brute force. Film after film, Shawky treats the journey as a mirror, one that exposes the cracks running through a society and its unsettled questions of identity and dignity. You can feel his documentary roots in how he shoots: he’s after reality as it actually is, not as it’s supposed to look.
A small family that looks a lot like us
“Stories” is Shawky’s third feature and stars Nelly Karim, Amir El-Masry, and Ahmed Kamal. In it the young director more or less lives out something Andrei Tarkovsky wrote in “Sculpting in Time”: “Of course, my point of view is subjective—thank God! In his work the artist breaks down reality in the prism of his perception and that is precisely why he is able to see so many different sides of reality in the foreshortening effects which are his and his alone.”
As in his earlier films, this one draws straight from lived experience. “It all started in 2019. I wanted to make a film about how my mother and father met,” Shawky said in a television interview with Mona Elshazly. “My mother’s from Austria, my father’s from Egypt… Over the years the film grew, and it turned into more of a fantasy. But a lot of it, you’ll find, is true: things that happened to my grandfather, my grandmother, my uncles, the stories they used to tell about that time.”
The film follows a middle-class Egyptian family in Giza’s Omraneya district from 1967 to 1984, their daily life running up against the political, economic, and social upheavals that defined those years: the 1967 defeat, the October War, Sadat’s assassination.
This is a family that looks like our own grandparents and parents, people who spent years just trying to get by
The camera stays close to the father, Ragheb (Ahmed Kamal), his wife, Fayrouz (Nelly Karim), and their three children. One of the film’s central threads is their son Ahmed’s (Amir El-Masry) dream of becoming a concert pianist, and alongside it, his love affair with an Austrian girl. Across five distinct time periods, the film traces how wars, political decisions, rising prices, and economic liberalization work their way into the smallest corners of family life. Football carries a lot of that weight too, especially the family’s devotion to Zamalek, along with the music, the songs, and the news broadcasts of each era. Underneath it all sits a quiet indictment of how badly state media failed to reflect what ordinary citizens were actually living through.
Watching it, I kept thinking: this family looks like all of us. Like our grandparents and parents, who spent long stretches of their lives trying to survive more than trying to chase their dreams. Here was the Egyptian citizen, carrying the weight of home and livelihood, of shifting politics and war, of prices that never stopped climbing. Their dreams stayed modest, and still they kept running into circumstances too big for them. The film recovers the memory sitting inside every Egyptian household: regimes changing, one crisis following the last, and the ordinary person always the one left to pay for it, and somehow keep hold of hope anyway.
It all started with a love story
“It all started with a love story. I wanted to make a film about a love story.” That’s how Shawky described where the film came from. No political or historical event sits at its root, just a real romance between his Egyptian father and Austrian mother, one that bloomed in letters crossing the sea through the 1970s.
In the film, those letters travel between Ahmed, a young Egyptian pianist, and Elizabeth, an Austrian girl, and they become a bridge between two worlds separated by thousands of kilometers. Each one takes weeks to arrive, and then the waiting starts all over again for a reply. I loved seeing that detail on screen, the way it shows love holding out against distance, borders, and time.
It brought to mind Ghassan Kanafani’s letters to Ghada Al-Samman, written through the 1960s before Mossad assassinated him in 1972. Back then, too, a letter could take days or weeks just to cross a border, and then came another long wait for a reply that might never hurry itself along. That’s exactly what gave letters their weight, and it’s the same weight the correspondence scenes in “Stories” manage to capture: a feeling we’ve mostly traded away for smartphones and instant messaging.
The letters begin in the summer of 1967, right after the June defeat, when Ahmed signs up for a pen-pal program with people abroad, looking for some way out of the wartime despair around him. The first letter arrives from Elizabeth, and from there a long correspondence takes shape, the two of them trading the small details of daily life along with their dreams and fears.
Elizabeth becomes Ahmed’s window onto a different world, one that values art and freedom. He tells her about his love of music, his modest family, everything standing between him and his dream given the political and social conditions around him. Over the years the relationship deepens, the letters turn into a real love story, and even as they trace how the country and society around them are changing, they become a record of how these two people are growing up together.
If anything, I wished the film had given this love story more room. It’s the most cohesive thread in the whole film, the one best able to hold feeling and idea at once, and to let the audience sit with questions of dreams, migration, and the search for the self against a turbulent backdrop.
Human reflections
The film handles comedy and tragedy with real precision, using humor to view a harsh reality from a more human angle. That humor comes straight out of daily family life: the family’s fierce, slightly absurd devotion to Zamalek, their conviction that switching seats mid-match might break a jinx and hand the team a win, the characters’ unguarded reactions, the small ironies time keeps playing on their modest dreams. Passing moments turn into ones that carry a smile and an ache together—a comic instinct that lightens the drama without cheapening it, giving the characters real depth and honesty.
The film also leans on symbol and suggestion rather than slogans or anything stated outright: sunflower seeds as a stand-in for everything that wastes people’s attention on trivialities, the baldness Ahmed inherits from his father, the hero’s dream finally coming true the same day Zamalek wins the African championship in 1984. Even the correspondence with the Austrian girl becomes a symbol of the pull to cross both geographic and psychological borders.
And yet, for all its human weight, for all our hunger for this kind of filmmaking, and despite a genuinely gifted performance from Amr Abed after years away from the screen, the film spreads itself too thin. The sheer number of storylines, branching off into every family member’s individual path, pulls focus away from any single driving conflict.
During the intermission, a woman sitting near me leaned over and asked, “Is this movie boring, or is it just me?” I understood exactly why she asked. The film gives itself a lot of room for daily detail and reflection, a pace that won’t suit anyone looking for a fast-moving plot, and it isn’t built on mounting suspense or big twists either. Instead, it builds its world out of small, accumulating moments, more interested in feeling, memory, and time than in dramatic tension, and it leaves plenty for the viewer to work out alone.
What didn’t work for me: the film doesn’t dig deep enough into some characters’ psychological motivations, and its use of archival footage doesn’t always sit comfortably within the story. In places it feels closer to documentation than to something actually serving the drama. Even so, it’s a film worth watching, and worth sitting with afterward.