São Paulo – Egyptian movie Feathers (2021, 112 min) premieres on Thursday (23) in movie theaters in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Niterói, and Brasília. Egypt’s Omar El Zohairy directed the comedic drama and cowrote the script with Ahmed Amer.
The movie tells the story of a family from Egypt. When a magic trick goes awry at a children’s birthday party, the authoritative father of the family turns into a chicken. The mysterious transformation sets the family off to a tragically funny adventure of self-discovery to survive without the patriarch.
“It is a story focused on the humans, beings who without consciously searching for it, are led to understand who they really are. (…) My movie talks about how to better connect with others,” the director was quoted as saying in a statement. This is the first feature film by El Zohairy, who added that he decided to resort to the fantastic and the absurdity because he found the reality boring.
And why a chicken? The filmmaker chose this animal for the transformation because it “is very fragile, and turning a man, an authoritative father figure, into this bird, is very funny (…) And then a chicken is relatively passive,” he said.
All the leading actors of the film come from a village in South Egypt. They were noticed by the director on the street or when searching for locations. El Zohairy wanted to create something that was completely new, with people that had no experience in comedy. He didn’t give them a script, didn’t have rehearsals and gave no indication on how to perform on set.
“I wanted their reality. I put them in front of the camera and let them say what they want to say. I only gave them the general idea of the scene we were filming, in a very simple way,” he said.
Feathers premiered at the Cannes Film Festival 2021 where it won the Critics’ Week Grand Prize. Feathers is a co-production between France, Egypt, Netherlands and Greece.
Omar El Zohairy was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1988. He studied film directing at the high Institute of Cairo and worked as an assistant for Egyptian feature films. His short films include Breathe Out (2011) e The Aftermath of the Inauguration of the Public Toilet at Kilometer 375 (2014), screened in Cannes.
In São Paulo, the movie will screen at Reserva Cultural starting tomorrow (23) at 1:40 pm, 4:10 pm and 6:40 pm, featuring Brazilian Portuguese subtitles. For more information, please visit the website of Imovision, the film distributor in Brazil.
Watch the trailer below:
Technical sheet
Feathers
A film by Omar El Zohairy
112 min
2021
Drama, Comedy
Script by Ahmed Amer and Omar El Zohairy
Translated by Guilherme Miranda
