When the main actress of Plumes showed up for her first day of filming, she had no experience in the business. She couldn’t even read his text. “I wanted to study, and my father would have loved to send us to school, but he couldn’t afford it”, says Demyana Nassar, 40.
Before starring in this film, she was a stay-at-home mother in the village of Al-Barsha in central Egypt. His CV turned out to be perfectly suited to the role. In Plumes, she plays a devoted mother of three children, to whom her husband seems to only speak to tell her what to cook for dinner. One day, this worker is turned into a chicken by a conjurer invited to celebrate their son’s birthday. The magician is unable to find a counter-spell. And here they are, clinging to their filthy apartment in the face of mounting debts and the threat of eviction: a white chicken, three little boys and a woman – whose life already seemed dreary even before that her husband is turned into fowl – more and more desperate.
A political taboo
The film won two major awards at the last Cannes Film Festival* [le grand prix Nespresso de la Semaine de la critique et le prix Fipresci], a first for an Egyptian feature film. But the following fall, instead of making a triumphant return to the country, he came up against a political taboo. Plumes depicts a poor and grim Egypt, a far cry from the prosperous, modernizing country that its president, Abdel Fattah Al-Sissi [au pouvoir depuis 2014]claims to build.
Several famous actors left the room during the first Egyptian screening as part of the El-Gouna festival [en octobre 2021]denouncing “an insult to Egypt’s reputation”. Some media outlets and presenters close to the government have also accused the film of damaging the country’s image, while others have quietly removed any mention of Cannes awards from their websites.
“These reactions are nothing new. This
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The New York Times (New York)With 1,600 journalists, 35 overseas bureaus, 130 Pulitzer Prize winners and some 5 million total subscribers, The New York Times is by far the leading daily newspaper in the country, in which one can read “all the news that’s fit to print” (“all information worthy of publication”).
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