"About a Girl" Refutes Egypt's Mythical Stereotypes about Women

On Monday, the Egyptian short film "About a Girl" was screened at the Cairo International Film Festival. The film introduced an artistic refute of the Egyptian community's long applied stereotypes about Women.

Through observing the events of an Egyptian young girl's daily life, the film tries to give the audience the full image from different perspectives; the reality and the imaginative stereotype. For example, there is a scene for the girl while she is talking nicely to her fiance. This scene was scripted in 2 ways: the reality that the girl is talking nicely on her way to work, the image her fiance imagined that she is dressed in sleeping clothes getting ready for bed.

The film was mainly based on providing the audience with mythical stereotypes and reality.

Another mesmerizing scene is women's applying those stereotypes to each other which is somehow shocking.

The final scene of the film was more shocking as it represented the real chaos in the girl's mind after meeting all those situations.

She imagined that everything was upsidedown: Tanoura Dancer was dressed in hip-hop style, a girl dressed in angelic customs smoking hash, a clown riding a motorbike, a carnival musical group in the street.

Scripting all those minor details in a 30-second scene was really catchy. This concept is called Bakhtin's Carnivalesque. It means the moment when the world is standing on its head, in other words, it is the moment when everything loses its order, the queen becomes slave, and the slave becomes a ruler.

This world of chaos' reflected the real mess in the girl's mind. The final scene was the girl being in the heart of this miss and smiled after the shock, as if she said, "ok, we will stay like that forever!"

Directed by Marwan Nabil, the film starring Riham Abdel Ghafour, Salwa Othman, and Mohamed Ali Rizk.