Film
In the Last Days of the City

“Berlinale Spotlight World Cinema Fund”

Friday, 29. January 2021 at 07:00 p.m.
Online

Goethe-Institut Bangladesh in partnership with the World Cinema Fund Berlinale introduces a new online screening series of WCF-funded films.

Film screening series title: “Berlinale Spotlight World Cinema Fund”
 
This online series will showcase outstanding international productions in the next four months.
 
AKHER AYAM EL MADINA (In the Last Days of the City) is a Winner of the Caligari Film Award at the Berlin International Film Festival 2016 (Forum) and Best Director at the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema.
 
WCF is a prestigious initiative of the Berlin International Film Festival, along with the Federal Foundation for Culture and in cooperation with the Federal Foreign Office, the support of the Creative Europe/Media Programme, the Secretariat of ACP Group of States and further support of the Goethe Institut.
 
Goethe-Institut Bangladesh is co-hosting the event with different other Goethe-Instituts of South-Asian region in their network.

Synopsis:
Downtown Cairo, 2009. Khalid, a 35 year old filmmaker is struggling to make a film that captures the soul of his city while facing loss in his own life. With the help of his friends, who send him footage from their lives in Beirut, Baghdad and Berlin, he finds the strength to keep going through the difficulty and beauty of living In the Last Days of the City.

Director: Tamer El Said, 2008, colour, 118 min. 

You can watch the film by the following Vimeo live link https://sheracholochitro.com/. This link will be activated only after 4:50 p.m. today.

“A moving and extremely personal city symphony that takes its audience on a journey connecting the most intimate to the state of the world we are living today, a film from the heart”
Jury of New Horizon International Film festival, Poland 2016.--------------------

“Beautifully lensed and complexly edited in a dense patchwork of people, feelings and events”
Deborah Young, The Hollywood Reporter-------------------

“Majestic... a lionhearted elegy for the Egyptian capital, artistic heritage in the Arab world, inspired politics, and hope itself”
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Artforum

THE FILM’S JOURNEY:
In the Last Days of the City was born as an idea in 2006, while war was raging in Iraq and Lebanon.
 
By the time shooting began at the very end of 2008, the global financial crisis had begun, the Gaza war was under way, and protest movements calling for social and political change had become established as a regular reality in Egypt. With an ageing dictator priming his son to inherit power and extreme levels of poverty amidst the luxurious excesses of corruption, the sense that things could not go on like this was palpable.
 
The film was conceived as an act of witness, set on the borders of fiction and reality. The script was completed by Tamer El Said and Rasha Salti in 2007. It created the soul of the film while being open enough to allow the film to respond to life in the cities and people that would carry it. With the exception of Khalid and Laila, all the film’s characters play a version of themselves. The stories of Hanan and Maryam are very personal stories of loss, filmed as documentary. Khalid’s mother is played by Tamer’s mother. His three friends are filmmakers who got to know each other through filmmaking before working on In the Last Days of the City.
 
Bringing together the cast and crew was a major undertaking which came together by 2008, however at that point less than 15% of the budget was in place. Faced with the decision of postponing the film, and recognizing a now or never moment, the crew and cast decided to throw caution aside, defer their fees, and film guerilla. Originally planned as a three month shoot, the film took two years and three winters to complete. Without the unrelenting dreams and efforts of an entire cast and crew willing to adjust their lives to the needs and unruly rhythms of the film it simply would not have been made.
 
The story of the filming was an epic improvisation, of losing locations and finding new ones; of losing actors and changing story lines; of filming events that became part of the fabric of the story; of gradually finding a community of investors and funders willing to take a risk on the film’s team.
 
Throughout, Tamer’s mother was ill. Sadly, she passed away weeks before shooting was completed. Utterly exhausted, the film’s team returned to their lives in December 2010 hoping to rest for some time. Six weeks later Egypt’s streets erupted in revolution and toppled Mubarak. Called In the Last Days of the City long before this moment of rupture, it turned out to have been a film shot with a sense of foresight and edited with the benefit of hindsight. Everything the film had captured gathered entirely different meanings, and kept developing new ones with each turn in the race of events. Meanwhile, the editing room settled down to grapple with over 250 hours of footage against the backdrop of mass demonstrations and a country convulsing, each person participating in parallel to the film in their own way.
 
A key aspect of the film’s journey was a common desire to confront the hurdles that made making In the Last Days of the City and films like it so difficult. Indeed so much of what made the film possible, was a sense that big sacrifices were essential to move beyond the flattening of Arab stories and images into stereotypes and news. Aware that so many issues facing Arab cinema are infrastructural, and identifying themselves within a much larger movement across the region, work began to establish an alternative film centre called Cimatheque as a fully equipped hub for education and screening to support the local filmmaking community. Built over the last five years and functioning in parts since 2012, it opened last June.
 
The making of In the Last Days of the City was a defiant collaboration between individuals from many countries who broke from roles and rules to make a seemingly impossible film happen – a search for the pulse of an exceptional moment.