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Ambiguous, Kafkaesque and with a deadpan wit, Egyptian director Omar El Zohairy’s debut feature explores a woman’s place in a man’s world

Egyptian film-maker Omar El Zohairy is a brilliant emerging talent with an impressive professional pedigree; he is a former assistant to Yousry Nasrallah (who himself started out as assistant to the celebrated Youssef Chahine) and has won festival prizes with this, his debut feature. It’s a comedy with a little of Woody Allen or Franz Kafka – though with not much of the famous Emily Dickinson quote about what hope is. It is also a social-surrealist parable about a woman’s place in a man’s world. Higher than the animals? Lower than the animals? El Zohairy conjures something elegant and mysterious with a deadpan wit, which coolly encases its compassion. He frames his shots with superb compositional flair – this film actually reminded me of another Egyptian film,...

167 film critics from 68 countries voted on the awards organised by the Arab Cinema Centre.

Egyptian director Omar El Zohairy’s social satire Feathers, which won the top prize at Cannes Critics’ Week last year, has swept the board at the sixth edition of the Critics’ Awards for Arab Films.

The film, which was nominated in four categories, won best film, director and screenplay.

This year’s edition of the awards, spearheaded by the Cairo-based Arab Cinema Centre (Acc), focuses on Arab-language films that premiered on the festival circuit outside of the Arab world in 2021.

It was voted on by 167 film critics from 68 countries,...

Past best film awards from the previous five editions include Wajib, Yomeddine and Gaza Mon Amour.

Jordanian director Bassel Ghandour’s The Alleys and Egyptian director Omar El Zohairy’s Feathers lead the nominations in the sixth edition of the Critics Awards for Arab Films.

The films each garnered nominations in four categories, including best film, director and screenplay.

Spearheaded and run by the Cairo-based Arab Cinema Centre (Acc), this edition focused on Arab-language films that premiered on the festival circuit outside of the Arab world in 2021.

It was voted on by 167 film critics from 68 countries, who viewed the films on Festival Scope.

It speaks volumes that we get to know the woman’s back, hunched over dishes or laundry, against cracked tiles rimmed in dirty grout, before we get a proper look at her careworn face. And even then, the eyes of this Egyptian housewife (a superbly self-contained Demyana Nassar), the mother of two grimy, wriggling little boys, remain downcast as her husband (Samy Bassiouny) barks a grocery order and carefully metes out dirty banknotes from a meager supply. It seems, briefly, as though Omar El Zohairy’s Cannes Critics’ Week winner “Feathers” will continue in this vein, as a beautifully framed, sharply observed, quiet depiction of social inequity, squalor and the subjugation of women in an Egyptian factory town. But that’s before the husband turns into a chicken.

Strangeness runs through El Zohairy’s tremendously impressive and complete feature debut like an electrical current, but it is treated with absolute,...