Today with decades of cumulative social and political effervescence, and the subsequent change of values, model answers come from film, and from whoever has a louder voice, be it a right wing religious platform, or a nationalist body.

Even the most sacred became marketable: tapes and catalogues of preachers speeches are packaged and sold alongside belly dance VCDs and VHSs and pop singers cassettes, in grand surface commercial outlets as well as in simple cassette kiosks in the corner of downtown Cairo streets.

In visions of cheeseburger memory, a protagonist, his blood saturated by the intake of urban city medicines, flooded by advertising imagery and bombarded by Hollywood action film, impersonates his favorite Hollywood heroes. In his head reality is mixed with fiction, facts are mingled with delusions, and the result is confabulation of all his city experiences, a cosmopolitan city of billboards, noise, pollution and violence, and set of behaviors and attitudes manipulated by Hollywood, violence aesthetics and excess consumption of the senses.

Left Screen: The Sea

The Sea, and the river for me represent the kinetic.
Flowing water represents for me the continuous flux and flow of ideas, of thought and of ideology; everything and every single drop is ephemeral in its place, always in motion, never twice in the same place.
In Egypt, where I grew up, we have two identical expressions for both the sea and the river: “tarh el bahr” and “tarh el nahr”; both have the same identical meaning: the “proposal” of the sea, and the river respectively.
The term in current Egyptian slang has a much more powerful meaning: the throw-up (puke) of the sea (or river).
To me, the successive flux/flow of proposals of ideology and thought over the past decades have been generous and massive; what we kept of it and adopt today is only the throw-up.

Khaled hafez
2007