Safaa Fathy

In her documentary, director Safaa Fathy tells the story of her brother Mohammad, who lived all his life along the banks of the River Nile. The more polluted the water became, the sicker Mohammed got. A chronic kidney disease caused directly by the environment led to his early demise.

An exploration of the life and ideas of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004).

The film was originally conceived as a portrait of Dr. Nawal El Saadawi, the well-known Egyptian doctor, writer, and women’s rights activist. But the director was disappointed by the encounter with the woman who had been her great role model. Instead, she set out to discover what life means to Egyptian women by visiting her female relatives. Her mother, aunts, and neighbors talk about life as a married woman, about the traditional clitoridectomy of girls, about love and sexuality. The result is a very impressive and extremely personal film.

"De tout cœur", editing by Safaa Fathy,2005 – During Jacques Derrida ’s last years, Safaa Fathy filmed the philosopher ’s public lectures. Safaa Fathy put together three of these original lectures in a film for the FIDMarseille festival. “De tout cœur ” speaks of life and death, the Other and friendship. Derrida was unable to accept the invitation to attend the Writers ’Parliament in Strasbourg, so he sent an “open letter to Palestine ”. Facing the camera,he reads a collage of texts, excerpts from books and correspondence. The second fragment shows the statement on cloning made by Derrida, unique in his career, presented at the Kléber bookstore in Strasbourg. Lastly ,on the occasion of a conversation filmed in a Paris University, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy deconstruct together and in public the imagination of the heart. These are three records of living words, three exercises in thinking on sight.

In the city of Nijar in Spain, the balsa of Isabel Esteva is a place in the open air where waters are collected to irrigate the land. Safaa Fathy filmed the reflections of the sky on the liquid surface at the pace of one second every half-hour, from morning to evening every day. Time passes and leaves its mark on fixed shots. The voice of Jacques Derrida reads a poem written by Safaa Fathy, translated from the Arabic by Zeinad Zaza and Derrida himself. Between sound and image, interior and exterior, this film invites us to travel in the density of time.