Bashtaalak sa’at / Shall I Compare You to a Summer's Day?
The love story begins, like thousands of other love stories before it: ‘Once upon a time …’ A female narrator reports on the relationship of two men. A polyamorous choir of previous lovers begins. The figures come and go at the Club Sheherazad. It is about Grindr dates, heartache, and love in a threesome. And what about a happy end? Based on his own love journal, the director creates a metareflective and polyphonic queer variant of One Thousand and One Nights: a non-heteronormative musical that combines Arabic folk tales with Egyptian pop music and brings songs and poems to unfold in a new, more vibrant way based on multiple media. His film, titled after Shakespeare’s 18th Sonnet, conceptualizes nothing less than a supra-temporal safe space in which personal and collective memories resonate with our current hopes and dreams.