Feature documentary hybrid film — currently in development
Director: Bassem Yousri
Production: Bassem Yousri and Seen Films, Cairo
In October 2010, I returned to Cairo from five years in the United States — what I imagined would be a brief stay to renew my visa became the beginning of a life-defining project. I conceived Film Romancy and launched an open call for participants to collectively write the script for a romantic comedy. Ten young Egyptians joined a workshop that began in December 2010, setting out to draft a satirical romantic comedy that challenged the recurring stereotypes of romance, gender dynamics, and social roles in mainstream film — often drawing on their own personal experiences and references from local and international cinema. The workshop unfolded against a society boiling under harsh economic conditions, rising political Islamism, and the suffocating grip of police oppression. Shortly after, the revolution erupted, and I decided to stay. I never returned to live in the USA.
The upheaval reshaped everything — the workshop, the participants’ lives, and my own. The three-month process was abruptly overtaken by the events of January 25th, leaving the film unfinished. I put the project on hold in 2012, needing to understand what relationship my film had to these events, and where I stood in relation to them. It took more than ten years.
More than fifteen years after starting Film Romancy, I am revisiting footage that is difficult to watch — confronting a past version of myself I am in conflict with, inexperienced in group dynamics, managing a collective process I wasn’t yet equipped for. I draw a parallel between that improvised workshop and the mass protests sparked by the same generation at the same moment: both launched via Facebook open calls, both driven by a romantic belief in what was possible, both ending somewhere very different from where they began. I am now attempting to bring the participants back together to read the script they wrote and perform some of its scenes — confronting past versions of themselves while embodying the fictional characters they once imagined.
Film Romancy unfolds through an experimental structure interweaving three storylines: the workshop’s creative debates of 2010–11; the participants’ daily lives amid revolutionary upheaval; and fiction scenes from the unfinished script, 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.
Bassem Yousri 