On Monday 17 September, I went to see a screening of the film “In the Last Days of the City” featuring a Q&A with filmmaker Tamer El-Said, hosted at the Wexner Center for the Arts.  

In the Last Days of the City is a hard film to process and a hard film to forget. If I had to boil it down to words, I would describe it as a painting of the soul of the city of Cairo in a time of great emotional instability. The film looks at the city of Cairo through the eyes of local filmmaker Khalid in the months leading up to the revolution on Tahrir square that ousted President Hosny Mubarak from power. It’s an intimate look at the pre-grieving of a people knowing that their home is about to change forever.  

While that sounds like the makings for a film inherently political, following people angry and asking for change, that is not what this film is. It’s more of a deeply personal reconciliation or space for the emotions of a city, expressed through film. As El-Said described in our Q&A after the film screening, the main character is not Khalid, but rather the city of Cairo itself. Cairo unfurls her anger, her sadness, her hope, her history through the people Khalid shows us, and the ways he interacts with them. There’s a parallel in the film between the work an elderly calligrapher and poet is working on, and the work that Khalid does. The camera cuts to a scene with the calligrapher intent on his work, drawing with the help of a magnifying glass. Later we see the window of Khalid’s apartment with a similar magnifying glass hanging down from the ceiling, looking out to the city. In this way, El-Said helps us see Cairo as a poem.  

This film is deeply personal for El-Said. The everyday people the camera shows the audience – an old woman selling carnations, a man selling steering wheel covers – are people El-Said also sees everyday on his way from home to his office. The apartment used as Khalid’s apartment is even El-Said’s own home. It’s through these personal physical spaces that we, as an audience, are invited into a more personal, emotional space that explores the tension of being part of a city on the brink of great change.  

I really appreciated the Q&A with El-Said after the film. One of his points that struck me the most was how after the revolution that ousted Mubarak, the broader film world was seeking films that depicted the physical events of Tahrir square. He described how some producers came to him, saying they wanted to help with his film, but only if he added even forty seconds at the end to show Tahrir square.  

It’s not that Tahrir square is not important to El-Said, as he himself participated in the revolution; however, to add in those events would detract from what In the Last Days of the City is about. This struck me as something I’ve heard before. It seems a tendency to me that when broader industries of Western arts and academia seek representation of international stories, they often do so in strongly politicized ways – seeking the stories they want to hear. What El-Said does with this film is tell a story that he and, I hope, the city of Cairo want to tell.