Aisha Can't Fly Away: A Sisyphean, Thankless Chore

Some needed context, in 2023, A Civil War broke down in Sudan, two opposite armies fighting for territory: The Sudanese Army, and The Rapid Support Forces, killing sprees destroying cities, taking slaves, and killing people left and right. Sudan became (and still is) a warzone, and a lot of Sudanese started fleeing to neighboring countries and beyond. This led to the formation of Sudanese populations in Egypt and led to Murad Mustafa’s international success as a filmmaker.

The Sudanese immigrant situation is an important topic, a pressing development for both the Sudanese and the Egyptians, one that needs films to be made about it. And “Aisha Can’t Fly Away” is Murad Mustafa’s second film taking place in Egypt starring Sudanese following “I Promised You Paradise”. Both were in Cannes’ Official Selection, turning Murad suddenly into one of Egypt’s most internationally successful directors.

That fame and success don’t really apply inside Egypt, those types of slow, festival films don’t have that much appeal in Egypt, but that aside, A rising opinion between Egyptian Cinephiles is that he makes films for Festivals and European Audiences, which is a claim thrown at any filmmaking trying to make something unique and challenging.

It doesn’t help that Egypt’s “Elite”, its top stars and industry leads, as well Syndicate heads of both Musicians and Actors, are (and this is a diagnosis coming from a graduated doctor) showing symptoms of fascism, they are pro-censorship, having a very narrow conservative view of what art should be, and forcing it. Syndicate heads pan actors and singers from Lower Economic Classes, Censorship for offensive language, sexual content, or even poverty, under the excuse that it “Shows Egypt in a Negative Light”.

Case and Point, “Feathers”, a 2021 Egyptian Indie film that, like “Aisha Can’t Fly Away”, is a film starring a hard-working woman who doesn’t speak a lot, traversing Egypt’s poor and challenging slims, that features a Kafkaesque metamorphosis into a Bird that also had a big screening at Cannes.

When that Egyptian film was finally screened in Egypt, prominent Egyptian Stars attacked it saying it slandered Egypt’s Image, leading to the film getting banned. “Aisha Can’t Fly Away” will likely face a similar fate and get banned in Egypt, Early Cannes reactions from Egyptians who watched it were mixed, with people already calling it shocking and too vulgar.

This fascistic Art scene is very tempting for you to defend “Aisha” solely on principle, to not side with the narrow-minded, pre-historic Neanderthals that control Egypt’s Entertainment Scene. Because Egypt NEEDS films like “Aisha Can’t Fly Away”, films that are daring and challenging, full of rust, dust, ugly concrete, mud, blood, urine and pus, films where life is tough and people are poor and curse all the time, like real Egyptians do.

But Egypt also needs those movies to be good, which “Aisha Can’t Fly Away” isn’t.

To be fair, a movie made by all those funds from around the world, which was part of many Festival Workshops for writing, making, and postproduction is hardly “Not Good”, Those types of films simply pass through so many “Filters” to simply get made. But the end result lacks soul, authenticity, or emotional attachment. Even the things that would make me “defend” the movie, all the context mentioned above, doesn’t feel genuine, so loses its purpose of reflecting the real world and becomes fetishistic.

One example of that is how this film shows Cairo’s Metro, Cairo’s Metro sucks, a lot of the time it can be claustrophobic, oppressive, smelly, and hellish, and it is almost impossible for filmmakers to shoot there. But it sucks for different reasons than, say, New York’s Subway. In this film, the metro has a lot of graffiti and vandalism on the walls, which Cairo’s Metro rarely does and if it did, it wouldn’t look like that.

When I saw this, it simply hit me: This is made for Western Audiences, for a Cannes Audience to be screened next to French Movies about black French from Algeria. This does not reflect reality, people don’t curse because Egyptians curse, but because it is edgy and dirty, Aisha’s life isn’t tough because being a Sudanese immigrant in Egypt is hard, but because being the main character in a Festival Film is hard.

I found it very hard to engage with the film in good faith, or judge it as a film, as art, to not judge it as a film showing Egypt, but have a distance and pretend this film takes place in Mars or whatever and judge it in its own merits, but let me try:

This has some strong well-made scenes, The film’s external scenes give the film “some” authenticity despite its Orientalist tendencies, it has maybe the most incredible special effects, whether make-up, practical effects or CGI in any Egyptian film, with a very well executed scene that rivals “The Substance”.

On the other side, The film feels aimless, the central “body horror” element/metaphor feels poorly integrated into the rest of the film, and even if it was, it would have still been shallow, The whole film is surface level, characters aren’t allowed any depth, and don’t allow you any emotional investment, which makes watching it a chore. It’s honestly incredible that a film can feel both too long and yet as shallow as a short film.

The film’s problem of authenticity isn’t just that it doesn’t feel like Egypt but extends beyond that. The characters don’t feel like people, the events don’t feel like events, and the conflicts don’t feel like conflicts. In that sense, it is as fake and detached from reality as the commercial shallow films that those indie films should be the antidote for.

I do believe that Murad Mustafa has a very similar movie taste to mine, we likely like the same movies, and he draws from the same reference points I would draw from if I made a film. But we seem to like the same movies for very different reasons. So it is with a heavy heart that I will say the following passage:

I am glad to finally watch an Egyptian movie that has a scene where a senile man, paralyzed in his lower half, receives a forced, passionless, dry hand job from a Sudanese immigrant. But the experience of actually watching the film feels like how said dry hand job would feel like, for both giver and recipient. I kept begging for it to end, and it felt like it never does. Watching it felt like work, as Sisyphean, tortuous and thankless as Aisha’s daily chores.