Louly Seif

Stunning and surreal, this hybrid documentary finds a group of hotel staff reflecting on their life, hopes and dreams in a deserted Egyptian holiday resort.

Nine men gather for a workshop on a rooftop. There they perform confrontations of everyday life, with the police and at the workplace. In the process, the actors engage a space between the theatrical and the real. This is not a film about workers. The factory is a microcosm, a miniature Egypt.

Based on a text from the recent Egyptian novel The Revolution of 2053 by Mahmoud Uthman, and referencing a scene from Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), a time-traveller recounts his vision of the future of the Pyramids area, and by extension Egypt, in the year 2026 – a vision that strains to reach beyond, yet remains severely confined by the present’s imaginal constraints.

Exclusively utilizing footage from other Egyptian films that use the pyramids as backdrop, Domestic Tourism II explores the ways in which these iconic historical monuments can be reappropriated from the “timelessness” of the tourist postcard and reinscribed into the complex political, social, and historical moment in urban narratives.