Mohamed Diab was last fall’s San Francisco Film Society Artist in Residence – a program that brings a filmmaker to San Francisco for a two-week residency, which includes participating in each of the Film Society’s core areas – education, exhibition and filmmaker services, as well as a public screening,.
As part of his residency, Diab presented his last work, the feature film Cairo 678, the 2010 drama, which follows the lives of three women and their search for justice from the daily plight of sexual harassment in Egypt, is one of a handful of recent Egyptian films that shed light on and condemn sexism, misogyny, and challenge long-standing patriarchal systems of oppression in that country.
Diab is parlaying his recent successes, not-quite fresh from the 2-week long SFFS residence, into a new project, which will tackle his home country, Egypt’s political turbulence.
To be titled Clash, the action/thriller, which will be a co-production between Egyptian producer Mohamed Hefzy’s Film Clinic production company (My Brother the Devil) and the Dubai-based company EMC Media, will be set entirely inside an overcrowded police truck that’s full of both pro- and anti-Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators, who were all arrested together during one of the many protests that followed the events of 2013 Egyptian coup d’état, when then President of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, was removed from power by the military, as the Egyptian constitution was suspended.
It’s sounds surely like what will be a powder keg of a set-up.
“The film portrays a very real and tense situation that brings out the worst and best of humanity,” Diab said.
Production is scheduled to begin late summer, with a 2015 release eyed.
