The movie In the Last Days of the City is from Big World Pictures.
Downtown Cairo is an organism that still seems alive back in winter 2009/10, but is becoming increasingly alien even to those born there. Khalid is looking for a flat. He’s a filmmaker. He looks at his images over and over again, as if he were waiting from them to produce some sort of meaning.
The stories of his protagonists seem to come from somewhere inside him, he seeks points of reference in the outside world. The more he looks for them, the more they seem to disappear; not abruptly though, but in lengthy moments full of tenderness, such as when he bids farewell to his girlfriend who is leaving him, to his ill mother, to friends who have come to the city to premiere their films. For them, Cairo is a fixed reference point: One left Baghdad and is now living as a refugee in Berlin, another stayed there, a third lives in troubled Beirut. When they decide to send Khalid video material from their cities, it’s not so much about helping him with his film than preserving something they still associate with Cairo via this bond, fully aware that it’s already a fantasy.
Shot in Cairo, Beirut, Baghdad and Berlin during the two years before the outbreak of revolution in Egypt, In the Last Days of the City’s multi-layered stories are a visually rich exploration of friendship, loneliness and life in cities shaped by the shadows of war and adversity.
Check out photos from In the Last Days of the City:
