Feature Documentary Hybrid Film — currently in development
The 2024 video work presented below is a proof-of-concept piece — a step towards the main production of the feature film.
In his video work Film Romancy (2024), Bassem Yousri reflects on the social transformations that have transpired in Egypt over the past decade and their repercussions on a young generation of Egyptians. In late 2010, just before the so-called Arab Spring, a group of young individuals in Cairo took part in a workshop to create the script for a romantic comedy. Yousri led the workshop and filmed the participants as they engaged in the creative process of formulating characters and a plot based on their personal experiences. Soon after, as the revolution unfolded in Cairo, anti-government protests and societal upheavals profoundly impacted the workshop’s progress and everyone’s lives. Yousri continued for a year, documenting the workshop sessions and the lives of the workshop participants. About fifteen years later, the artist revisits the footage and focuses on the footage he took the night of 24 January 2011 that preceded the beginning of the protests. In this video, Yousri dissects and juxtaposes different types of footage in a symbolic attempt to analyze the impact of such a period on his and his collaborators’ lives during this time.
About the Feature Film
Film Romancy is a feature documentary hybrid film interweaving three storylines: the workshop’s creative debates of 2010–11; the participants’ daily lives amid revolutionary upheaval; and fiction scenes extracted from the unfinished script and performed anew more than a decade later. These layers blur the boundary between documentary and performance, reality and cinema, lived experience and constructed narrative. With seriousness, absurdity, and humor, the film explores generational disillusionment with romance as a parallel to the unfulfilled promises of revolution.
Director: Bassem Yousri Production: Seen Films, Cairo
Bassem Yousri 