Ahmed Awny

Feeling pressured by his male friends who are eager to learn how he, as a conventional male reared on machismo ideas, reacted to the revelation of his sister’s affair with a colleague, Shadi falsely claims that he beat her severely. He forgets this lie by the time he and his sister move from Port Said to Cairo where they become part of a community of educated elite. The women in the group admire Shadi for his progressive outlooks and he conforms so faithfully to his new-male image that he believes it truly represents him. Meanwhile, someone from his old world in Port Said suddenly appears. As he tries to keep his old lie from slipping out into his new world in Cairo, he comes across an anonymous blog on the internet by a woman who suspects she is his sister. The blogger relates how she grew up with a brother who used to bully and beat her. A documentary thread interweaves with the fictional narrative, relating the story of a woman who took part in the Port Said resistance during the tripartite invasion of 1956. The work also includes an analytical thread that examines depictions of Egypt as a female entity in political and artistic discourse.