The Cairo Oscar-nominated film “Foy, Foy, Foy” addresses the topical topic of illegal immigration from the Middle East and Africa, and Egypt is one of its sources, as well as Lebanon, where the tape originated. Thursday shows.
Written and directed by Omar Hilal, the film will be one of the finalists in the Best Foreign Film category from dozens of nominations from around the world.
The film tells the story of a security guard played by Mohammad Faraq, who lives with his mother in a poor neighborhood and seeks to immigrate to Europe in search of a better future. But not on a boat, because this method is financially expensive and fraught with suffering and danger.
So that the goalkeeper could travel to Europe, he pretended to be blind and joined a blind soccer team preparing to compete in the World Cup in Poland. The pseudo-blind man soon discovered that he was not the only one following this trick.
Director Omar Hilal (age 48) told Agence France-Presse when he was in Beirut with crew members to promote the film, about the circumstances that gave birth to his idea, “He read a post shared on Facebook. About a group of young Egyptians who were blinded by many followers, pretending to be blind.” Escaped to Poland and elsewhere.”
“I found exactly what I was looking for in the story,” said Hilal, who grew up in Saudi Arabia and Canada. Hilal made this story the backbone of his film, but he developed his dramatic text from his comments on “Events and Contradictions”.
He added, “In the real story, the team members are not regular football players but kettlebell players, a sport for the blind, close to volleyball.”
“Foy” is a Spanish word that means “I come.” Blind players say it when they have the ball to communicate with their teammates.
Nelly Karim plays the role of a journalist whose passion the team captures. The famous Egyptian actress told Agence France-Presse about her character in the film, that she is “a journalist tired of producing trivial headlines, so one day she (Al-Ihsan) went to interview young people at the club. She was introduced to a new world for her, and a story of light praise and shocks. “The only character who has faith in life,” he added.
Although the issue the film presents is tragic, Helal wanted to convey it in a “funny, humorous way, unlike what is usually seen in films dealing with illegal immigration”. The film does not rely on “crying and crying”, but rather its strength, according to Hilal, lies in the “uniqueness of the way the story is told”.
After attending the premiere in Beirut, Lebanese film critic Elias Toomer praised the choice for “a happy ending to a film about the tragedy of illegal immigration”.
The director, who works mainly in advertising, does not support illegal immigration. In this regard, “when the migrant reaches the other side, his life is not better.”
He stressed the need to “improve the conditions of young people to stay in their country and not risk their lives, as illegal immigration can kill them”.
Last June, several Egyptians were among the dozens of migrants who died when an old fishing boat sank off the coast of Greece in one of the largest incidents of migrant boat sinkings in Europe.
For Nellie Karim, “Illegal immigration is an important topic at the moment. People yearn (…) to travel to fulfill their beliefs, but (…) living conditions do not change for the better simply by traveling abroad.
The director hoped that “Foy, Foy, Foy” would impress those responsible for the Oscars. “My ambition was to reach international standards,” he said. When I managed the actors, I asked them to put more effort into their roles as we wanted to reach the Oscars.
The 15 semi-finalists to win the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar will be announced on December 21, and the list of five finalists in the category will be announced on January 23. to the Academy Awards ceremony on March 10 in Los Angeles.
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