Mohammed Hammad’s second feature “Safe Exit” has earned glowing reviews from Variety, which calls the Berlinale Panorama premiere a “masterclass” in rigorous construction and in-depth characterization. The 113-minute Egyptian drama centers on an ill Muslim woman on the margins of society thrown together with a Coptic security guard traumatized by a terrorist attack in contemporary Cairo.
Safe Exit (Credits: Variety)
Safe Exit Plot: A Story of Two Outcasts in Cairo
The film follows Samaan (Marwan Waleed), a twenty-something security guard working night shifts in a Cairo mixed-use building. A decade earlier, Samaan watched his father — a Coptic Christian — killed by ISIS in Libya, a trauma he has never escaped. Withdrawn and emotionally frozen, he only begins to emerge from his isolation when he meets a young Muslim woman (Noha Foad) who has no ID and nowhere to stay. Hammad began writing the script after watching the 2015 ISIS video documenting the execution of the 21 Coptic Christian martyrs of Libya.
Mohammed Hammad’s Safe Exit: Critical Response
Variety praises Hammad’s virtuosic control of style and subject — rigorous in form without sacrificing emotional power, addressing outsider status and the fear of terrorism in contemporary Cairo. Screen Daily echoes the sentiment, calling it a “spare, thought-provoking” drama anchored by Waleed’s painstakingly withholding performance. It follows Hammad’s 2016 debut “Withered Green,” which won Best Director at the Dubai International Film Festival. The film was released by MAD Distribution in MENA markets and is expected to continue its festival run.
Source: Variety — read the full story there.
