Documentary
2024 / 80 min
Egypt / Germany
Genre: Politics / Human interest
Stage: Post-production
Director: Bassam Mortada
Producer: Kesmat Elsayed
In search of understanding and healing, filmmaker and activist Bassam Mortada explores his father’s arrest, imprisonment and torture in 1989, reconstructing and reconsidering the experience that traumatized and divided his family.
In 1989, Mahmoud Mortada Bassams father was arrested, imprisoned and tortured at the infamous Abo Zabaal prison. Soon after release, Mahmoud left his family and country, making a new life in Vienna from which he would occasionally send cassette recordings to his wife and young son in Egypt. Bassam Mortada, a child of five in 1989, was raised by his mother, Fardous, a socialist activist herself, who made no secret of her anger and disappointment while carrying the burden of her own trauma and illness alone. She could not just “break down” like he had; she couldnʼt just leave. Between these two narratives, one partial and occasional, the other full and immediate, Bassam grew alienated from both, suppressing his own trauma and confusion. In this documentary consideration of the events of 1989 and their enduring ramifications, Bassam films his efforts to renew or restore relationships with his parents as the path to historical truth, emotional comprehension and psychological healing. In conversation with his parents, family friends and fellow prisoners of his fathers, he elicits painful memories, perspectives and insights. Probing his own history, he re-listens to the recordings sent by his father from Vienna, recreating visions, flashbacks and memories based on those tapes. Going a step further, he visits Abo Zabaal in order to reconstruct as closely as possible what his father endured 30+ years ago.
Documentary
2025 / 75 I 52 min
Egypt / South Africa / Germany
Genre: Wildlife / Human Interest / Environment
Stage: In production
Director: Omar Manjounah
Producers: Laura Kloeckner / Kesmat Elsayed
Mohamed Ezzat returns to Lake Nasser with one mission: saving the crocodiles that are disappearing. Will the experiment of a single young researcher succeed in stopping the hunters and fishermen on the lake and offer-ing an alternative?
When Egyptian environmental researcher Mohamed Ezzat returns to Lake Nasser, he makes a shocking dis-covery: the identity of the lake as he had known it all his life has dramatically changed. Fishermen have taken con-trol of the lake’s activities, surpassing their fishing habits to target the largest organism on the top of the lake’s food chain.
Crocodile numbers have since decreased in an unimaginable way. Once worshiped as god-like crea-tures in the ancient kingdom, they survived in the waters for millions of years.
Today, within only a few decades their existence nears extinction. This realisation leads Ez-zat to take action.
Together with a group of dedicated lonestars, he launches the first and only self-organised crocodile conservation unit in Egypt. The film follows the crew on a journey across Africa’s largest human-made lake as they uncover the dynamics and sublime networks of poachers that nurture the massive crocodile extermina-tion. As Ezzat and his crew pass their days and nights in complete isolation on the boat, their fears of the reptiles turn into a dreamy immersion with the magical worlds of the lake’s mythical features blurring the finities of reality.
2011 62 min
Egypt
Genre: Documentary
Director: Bassam Mortada
Producer: Kesmat Elsayed
Film follows six Egyptian journalists during the first 18 days of the Egyptian revolution 2011, focussing on their stories and their inner conflicts as they are torn between sympathizing with the rebellion and doing their duty as neutral reporters for an independent newspaper. Leading up to the stepping down of Hosni Mubarak, the viewer gets swept up in the events on and around Tharir Square in Cairo with stunning and often very moving footage and interviews.
