Souad

Bassant Ahmed and Basmala Elghaiesh shared the Best Actress prize at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival for their roles as sisters in this vital snapshot of what it is like to be a teenage girl in Egypt today. Souad (Ahmed), 19, presents a conservative face to her family and society while secretly taking selfies with her friends, posting them, and chatting with boys online. When a series of small incidents leads to an inexplicable tragedy, her younger sister Rabab (Elghaiesh), 13, starts looking for answers… Director Ayten Amin’s empathy comes through in every frame, making this a profoundly humanist and involving portrait of conflicted youth. ‘Amin’s bold second feature is brilliantly alive to the contradictions of teenage life in conservative Egypt… The film is remarkable not just for its razor-sharp, non-judgmental insight, which captures lives as well as environment with a cleareyed neorealist sensibility, but also for the nuanced performances.’ — Jay Weissberg, Variety