A transformation is afoot in Egyptian filmmaker Morad Mostafa’s Aisha Can’t Fly Away [+lee también:
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ficha de la película], his eagerly awaited feature debut that has collected a series of coveted awards along the way to its Cannes world premiere in Un Certain Regard. The project picked up major prizes at Cinemed meetings, Venice Final Cut and Marrakech’s Atlas Workshops, and was also developed at Cannes’ La Résidence du Festival in 2023. Now, the movie is the first Egyptian entry in the section since Mohamed Diab’s Clash [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] in 2016, whereas Mostafa last trod the Croisette with his 2017 short film I Promise You Paradise.

Buliana Simon takes on the title role of a Sudanese immigrant in the Cairo neighbourhood of Ain Shams, where she makes a meagre living working as a caregiver for the elderly in their own homes. She is friends with a local chef, Abdoun (Emad Ghoniem), who generously feeds her, but she’s plagued by the sheer horror of circumstance. One of the men she cares for, Mr Khalil (Mamdouh Saleh), is demanding and sexually coercive, while she is also made to work for gang leader Zuka (Egyptian rapper Ziad Zaza) by collecting keys so they can steal from people’s homes.

In the vein of last year’s Cannes ACID entry Mi Bestia [+lee también:
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ficha de la película], Aisha Can’t Fly Away later shifts into body horror as it flirts with nightmare sequences. In real life, Aisha also begins to develop a disturbing, invasive rash – all while being haunted by the sight of an ostrich, a notoriously flightless bird, alluding to the film’s title. Day in and day out, we watch her embattled with the forces that bind her to her new home, garnering only the slightest sense of relief by commiserating with other immigrants and calling back home.

Mostafa revels in a visually slick, conventionally “festival-cinematic” style lensed by The Village Next to Paradise [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] DoP Mostafa El Kashef, who has a proclivity for handheld that betrays the precarity of Aisha’s situation without jittering us out of our seats. However, the clean-cut, familiar nature of Mostafa’s cinematographic vision is brought down by a lack of narrative investment, even with the running time at just over two hours plus credits. Penned by Mostafa and producer Sawsan Yusuf, with a secondary writing credit to Mohamed Abdelqader, Aisha Can’t Fly Away doesn’t quite get to the point of misery porn, but at a certain moment, this tale of personal terror becomes bloated without significant substance.

The filmmaker acutely captures the peril of the migrant plight, but he struggles to convince us to empathise beyond cultivating in the viewer a sense of distress. We’re encouraged to develop a sense of disgust at some of the ultimately very gruesome acts that Aisha is made to partake in, but without more crucial pieces of character context in the writing itself, we can only watch in horror. Nonetheless, Mostafa has made it clear that he can deliver a visually satisfying result – even at the expense of creative risk.

Aisha Can’t Fly Away is a production by Bonanza Films (Egypt), in co-production with Nomadis Images (Tunisia), Shift Studios (Egypt), A.A. Films (Egypt), Cinewaves (Saudi Arabia), MAD Solutions (Egypt), Mayana Films (Germany), Coorigines (France), Arabia Pictures (Saudi Arabia) and Station Films (Sudan). Its world sales are managed by MAD Solutions subsidiary MAD World.