جولة ميم المملة (The Tedious Tour of M)

synopsis

Hend approaches the long forgotten, but much respected, novelist Mohamed Hafez Ragab in his simple apartment where he decided to seclude himself in the eighties. A filmmaker and a poet herself, she is intrigued by the fact that Hafez decided to voluntarily end his career at the peak. In Alexandria Ragab founded a literary union for marginalized laborers, attracting talented writers from underprivileged communities. Once he got to publish a story in a well read literary magazine, he was discovered by the high figures of the literary scene and offered a job in a prestigious cultural institution in Cairo. Naguib Mahfouz compared him to Kafka and Yahya Haqqi described his writings to be “Quivering brush strokes in the hand of a painter”. In the roaring 1960s of Cairo, Hafez Ragab was considered a revolutionary voice within the Arab literary scene. However, Ragab did not fit in white-collar society of writers in the metropolis. The alienation went on and pushed him to return to Alexandria and lock himself down in his house on the edge of the city. Hend insists to investigate the reason behind this radical change in the path, to find out that there is a huge secret and that Ragab believes that he is doomed to never write again.

about the filmmaker

Hend Bakr is a director and producer with Nubian origins. She studied Arabic language in the Faculty of Islamic Studies, Al Azhar University. She studied filmmaking in the Jesuits Cinema school in Alexandria and later co-founded Rufy’s Films. A major film production based in Alexandria. In 2013, she wrote, directed, and produced her first feature film “The Mice Room” in collaboration with five other directors, which was officially selected in international film festivals in Dubai, São Paulo, Tetouan, among others. “The Tedious Tour of M.” 2023 is Hend’s first feature documentary. which was officially selected in international film festivals in Amman, Gabes Cinema Fen, OZA Festival of Contemporary Documentary Film in Moscow, among others, and won several awards. In 2024 Hend founded “Dessi Films” A film production company, and produced the feature documentary “And There Was Evening and There Was Morning The First Day” the winning film in the Fipresci Film competition. directed by Youhanna Nagy. Hend is currently working on her second feature documentary, “Dwellers of the Cabins”.