Encounters South African International Documentary Film Festival

DIRECTORS: Jasmina Metwaly & Philip Rizk | Egypt | 2015 | 72min

On a roof-top overlooking the Cairo metropolis is an unusual theatre where a group of working-class men rehearse and stage confrontations, stories from everyday life. Police brutality, fabricated charges and exploitation all come under the unforgiving glare of the spotlight. Dissent is brewing in a newly privatised factory, and the manager – played here by a worker – plots how to cling to his control and profits, setting his security guards against his workers, calling in favours from a minister. Slipping between roles and characters, fact and fiction, between the blurred lines, is the truth – not just of factory life, nor solely of Egyptian issues – but a global social struggle against rampant capitalism, a systematised dispensability of human beings, felt just as harshly across our continent, and our world.