Jasmina Metwaly

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.

SOAP manipulates the language of cinema and soap operas, accompanying a group of left-wingers’ attempt to infiltrate right- wing social networks. The tactic chosen by the group, composed of intellectuals and cultural agents, is the creation of a telenovela that would convey subversive messages in the apparently conservative form of the religious cultural product.

A fable, using song and text to tell the story of a present frozen in Medusa’s gaze. Human and non-human protagonists appear: a historian from Alexandria, Carbon 12 and Carbon 14, as well as a Gorgone, who roams a city, detecting pasts and futures.

Examining interrogation as a performed scene, staged through gesture, repetition, set-up, and technical props. Taking the polygraph as its recurring prop, the work traces the script that structures interrogation. The formulaic scenes from police training films and film noir are punctured by a near-human test figure that shadows the characters’ movements, pulling their choreography into view. Across these fragments, interrogation reads like rehearsal. Repeated often enough, its staged action turns into procedure.