Girls Still Dream

In many ways the sister film to 'Horse of Mud', Al-Abnoudy’s graduation film at the Film School in Cairo is a portrait of Cairo’s street performers. The artistry of this community of fire-eaters, acrobats, child contortionists, and musicians is captured through the lens of Al-Abnoudy’s unobtrusive camera, accompanied by the spare and haunting narration provided by poet Abdel Rahman Al-Abnoudy. Playing with the poetry that offers image and cinema, she pays tribute to those underground enterteiners, giving back its letters of nobility to a marginalized and downgraded popular art.

This documentary is a set of interviews with women running for Egypt's Parliament in November of 1995. After a review of recent political history (from 1920 to the institution of women's suffrage in 1956, the election of two women to Parliament in 1957, the increase to 35 female MPs in 1984, and the fall to 10 in 1990), about 20 candidates talk to the camera: incumbents and newcomers; women from the ruling NDP party, from minor parties and independents. This is retail politics: meeting voters in small groups, holding store-front rallies. The candidates have feminist views, and they also champion clean water, better jobs, rebuilding housing after an earthquake, and fair, honest elections.

DIARY IN EXILE is a documentary film that uses a combination of sound, image, colour and peoples testimonies to historically account for the period following the fundamentalist military coup in the Sudan in 1989. This period witnessed the migration of a staggering number of Sudanese from their country to all parts of the World. The Sudan became an expellant of its people. The greater majority of Sudanese migrants headed to Egypt, where the film was shot, there is an estimated number of 3 million Sudanese migrants to Egypt since the military coup. Moving between different strata of Sudanese communities in Egypt the film, through various personal testimonies, throws light on the living conditions of ordinary people. All provide pieces of the saga, all have taken refuge in Egypt. All dream of returning back to Sudan, one day. The film was premiered at the United Nations Human Rights Conference, Vienna, in 1993.

A documentary portrait of a traditional peasant woman, Om Said.

El Abnoudy's first documentary depicts women in a mud-brick factory in the centre of Cairo, where they are treated like 'horses', working at repetitive and monotonous tasks in miserable conditions. Nevertheless, El Abnoudy brings out the women's dignity, showing a beautiful choreography to their movement. By giving control of the microphone to the workers themselves, she also allows the women's own stories to be interleaved with their work.

A documentary directed by Ateyyat Al Abnoudy

Documentary by Ateyyat El-Abnoudy

Interview with Amal Abul-Qassem Donqol, an egyptian poet.

Documentary by Ateyyat El-Abnoudy

Documentary by Ateyyat El-Abnoudy

Explores the daily life and work of children in Abnoud, a rural village located 600 kilometres to the south of Cairo, where the trains that carry the tourists to the south of Egypt pass through without stopping. A boy outsmarts the meagerness of his circumstances by dripping goat’s milk on a piece of stale bread and turning it into a special sandwich.

The great Egyptian documentarian El Abnoudy skillfully and subtly undermines the tendency towards nostalgia regarding the subject of manual labor in her work by showing that this job is now almost exclusively carried out by women and older men, while the young men strive for better professions or abroad.

The film deals with the problems of fishermen at the Suez Canal caused by the increasing privatization of public property, including shores and fishing grounds.

Documentary by Ateyyat El Abnoudy

In the north of Egypt, communities living near the salty lakes of El Borrolos during a treacherous drought.

A documentary by Atteyat Al Abnoudi.