32B

Mr. Hazem gets a rude awakening when he learns his teenage daughter needs to start wearing a bra in 32B.

Mohamed Tamer’s comic film begins at tennis practice, where Malak (Hana Shiha) is training with her doting father watching from the stands. While there, he is approached by one of the other mothers who tells him, in no uncertain terms, that Malak needs to start wearing a bra. Thus ensues an painfully awkward but charming and poignant story of a man trying to navigate an utterly alien rite of passage with no road map. The film took home the prize Tanit d’or at the Carthage Film Festival and screens now at Amman having seem to become a regular audience favourite in its festival journey.

This is, in no small part, down to Mohamed Mamdouh, who gives a wonderfully expressive performance as Mr. Hazem who veers from uneasy befuddlement to downright fear. Having been cornered at the sports ground, he is ill-equipped to speak directly to his daughter about this situation and fumbles through his painful discomfort while his daughter breezes along with her life, apparently oblivious. When she is out of the house for the day for a study group and class, he bites the bullet and heads to a lingerie shop to buy her her first bra.

From standing, frozen outside to the stilted and confusing conversation with the confident salesman – who assumes he is shopping for a lady friend – the perfectly encapsulates the difficulty of a man who just does not know how to speak about female subjects such as these. Mamdouh expertly sweats and twitches he way through the encounter before heading home to practice beginning this excruciatingly embarrassing conversation. The film ends on a touching but curiously ambiguous note, that speaks, in the most subtle of ways, to a further discomfort about female independence, and what it means to be a male single parent of a teenage daughter in contemporary Egypt.

Director: Mohamed Taher
Cast: Mohamed Mamdouh, Hana Shiha, Ahmed Dash, Jessica Hossam El Din, Gehad Hossam El Din
Screenwriter: Haitham Dabbour
Producer: Ahmed Nouh
Cinematography: Mostafa Fahmy
Editing: Baher Rasheed
Music: Ahmad Mostafa Zaky
Sound: Ahmed Sabbour
Production design: Asem Ali
Production companies: Red Star Films (Egypt)
Venue: Amman Film Festival (Arab Short Film Competition)
In Arabic
19 minutes

Read our coverage of more short films in our Verdict Shorts section.