Cairo – Right from the start of the feature-length film, the images shock: Yasmine, a 16-year-old high school girl, gives birth alone in her aunt’s bathroom.
Yasmine’s father and mother react with black despair and search for a way to save the family’s honour in a society that rejects a woman who has lost her virginity before marriage.
The film, which poignantly portrays the nightmare of a girl who can share her suffering with nobody, delivers a harsh critique of Egyptian middle class values.
Her father and mother, both government employees who are practicing Muslims, are fated to become prisoners of social and religious conformism.
Upon reaching puberty, their daughter has no right to an explanation of the physical and emotional changes she undergoes. She becomes ashamed of herself and her body as her mother is too embarrassed to broach the subject.
Having received no informal or formal education about sex, a subject that is taboo both at home and at school, Yasmine ends up pregnant after a tryst with a boy of the same age who lives next door.
In the hospital where she was brought for treatment after the delivery, a bearded doctor decides to circumcise her, even though it is banned by Egyptian law.
The doctor argues his decision was justified by Islam.
“The film is inspired by a true story which happened five years ago,” screenwriter Azza Shalabi told AFP.
“It doesn’t seek to denounce anyone – neither adolescents, nor parents – but we wanted to denounce the tendency in our society to hide truths and ignore real problems,” she added.
The film’s director Magdi Ahmed Ali has broken taboos in the past.
Several years ago in his film The World, My Love, he was also the first to bring to the big screen the story of illegal hymen replacement surgery aimed at “restoring” the virginity of women.
“I feel concerned about all the problems of the oppressed in our country and women are among them,” Ahmed Ali said.
“There are a lot of political, religious, and sexual taboos in this country. Sexual taboos are the easiest to raise in our work, because the censors allow us to speak more openly and boldly about them,” he said.
His latest film has passed muster with censors.
Egyptian intellectuals who emerged from an advance showing of the film found it both bold and moving. The reaction from the wider public, who will be able to see it at the box office next week, remains to be seen.
Egyptian cinema, which went through a crisis in the last decade as output dropped from more than 100 films produced annually to fewer than 10, has rebounded in the last year.
In 2000, 33 films were produced and this year industry sources predict there will be 50 feature-length films turned out.