Films: All My Life
Purchase Online
-
Rush Tickets Only. Advance Tickets Not Available - Rush Tickets may be available at the screening.
Sunday, June 22, 8:30 PM
Victoria Theatre
ALLM22V
ATTENTION
Date has passed.
All My Life
Egypt, 2008, 150 Minute Running Time
Genre/Subjects: Drama, Gay, Homophobia, Local Filmmakers / Subjects, Middle Eastern
Program: World Cinema
Language: Egyptian, Arabic English subtitles
DIRECTOR: Maher Sabry
Epic in length but intimate in scope — and certainly the most daring and sexually explicit portrait of homosexual life in Egypt yet put on screen — Maher Sabry’s film evocatively details the tribulations of 26-year-old Rami, an accountant and dance student living in Cairo. Rami’s boyfriend, Waleed, has just ended their relationship in order to get married. His best girlfriend Dalia is leaving Egypt for San Francisco. And his doctor pal Kareem is pestering him to be more involved in the city’s quasi-underground gay community.
As Rami pursues his own romantic path of one-night stands with closet cases and fetishizing tourists, Kareem is arrested in a police raid on a floating discotheque called the Queen Boat (based on an actual incident in 2001, which catalyzed gay Egyptians and a variety of international human rights organizations into action).
In his ambitious profile of the multifaceted world of his main character, Sabry’s wide-reaching story also includes a devout man living upstairs from Rami, who is trying to quell his longing for women, and an unhappily closeted kid named Mina, who lives across the way. All of these characters are portrayed with palpable compassion — and often in various states of undress — with a variety of dramatic denouements.
A fascinating, if dispiriting, portrait of the current situation for gay Egyptians, All My Life represents a bold cinematic step forward and sets the benchmark for future explorations. — ROD ARMSTRONG
co-presented by
Arab Film Festival,
Queer Jihad and
South West Asian and North African Bay Area Queers (SWANABAQ)
Official Film Website
Print Source PDF
You might also enjoy...
-
Iran
,
2008
,
74 min.
Tanaz Eshagian’s award-winning chronicle of Iran’s transsexual community examines the cost of undergoing state-sanctioned, gender-reassignment surgeries to avoid harassment and imprisonment under Islamic law....
more
-
USA
,
2007
,
81 min.
Muslim gay filmmaker Parvez Sharma travels the world to uncover the lives and struggles of his faith’s most unlikely storytellers: lesbian and gay Muslims, whose voices have never been heard—until now....
more