When this year’s Berlinale closed – after days of debate over political speech and a prize ceremony that amplified voices from the region – it confirmed what the festival has long represented: a space where cinema and geopolitics intersect. Egyptian feature Safe Exit, which screened in Panorama, sat squarely within that tradition.
“This film in Egypt is very sensitive,” director Mohamed Hammad tells The National, presenting his second feature in Berlin after 2016’s Withered Green, which won Best Director at the Dubai International Film Festival. “This is very dangerous. I and Christians and Muslims. This is very, very, very sensitive.” He recalls being advised by a producer to make something more conventional and less incendiary. It was advice he ignored.
The story centres on Simon (Marwan Waleed), a twenty-something security guard working night shifts in a mixed-use building in Cairo. He dreams of becoming a writer, but is emotionally withdrawn – and with reason. A decade earlier, he witnessed his father, a Coptic Christian, killed by ISIS in Libya. With his older brother now in prison, it is only when he meets a young Muslim woman that he begins, tentatively, to emerge from his isolation.
Hammad began writing the script after watching the horrific video released in February 2015 by ISIS, documenting the execution of the 21 Coptic Christian martyrs of Libya – 20 Egyptians and one Ghanaian. The men, construction workers, were abducted and murdered because of their faith.
“I asked myself many questions about the aftermath, about what happened,” Hammad says. “About children whose parents were slaughtered in this massacre. What would happen to them?”
He realised that the children of those killed would now be in their twenties. “They are now Gen Z, and this is complicated. I think this topic deserves to be a film, because this is important for me. And I think the director should be a professional observer. So I observe these people, and try to discover this chronic PTSD or chronic trauma, because this traumatic past reappears more and more.”
After travelling to Minya, where many of the victims were from, and meeting family members, Hammad shaped a story that channels this generational trauma through Simon. “He has an aversion to having any sort of emotional reaction,” the director explains. “The fear that accompanies him in everything and the lack of a sense of security and safety … this actually pushes them more into loneliness and more suffering.”
Simon’s profession is, of course, pointedly ironic. “He’s a security guard, but he lacks security,” says Hammad. “In Egypt specifically, the work of a security guard is usually given to the people who are most vulnerable in our society, the people who are most fearful. Just like one of the characters says at the beginning: ‘What do we have to do with anything? We’re just poor security guards.’”
A slow-burn thriller, Safe Exit unfolds with austere patience. Hammad, an admirer of the late Hungarian auteur Bela Tarr, draws a strikingly restrained performance from Waleed, a mechanical engineer by training with limited acting experience, who is currently serving military duty and could not attend the festival. “His face is very expressive,” says the director. “Even the way he walks and the way he moves. He’s very similar to the persona of Simon, and that’s why we enjoyed working together.”
The film will be released across the Middle East and North Africa by MAD Distribution. In Egypt, however, its fate remains uncertain.
“I hope we can screen the film there. That’s the most important thing to me, to actually show the movie in Egyptian cinemas. This movie wasn’t made with the attempt of pleasing the public here in Berlin, which is also important. But it touches me more to give it to the Egyptian public. Because they see themselves.”
A graduate of Helwan University, where he studied mass communication, Hammad is cautious about predicting how the film might be received at home.
“Before even answering the question of what the reaction might be, my concern is let’s see if it’s actually shown in Egypt. Maybe it won’t be picked up. And in that case, I would take any reaction.”
Does he think Egyptian distributors will be wary? “I don’t want to get ahead of myself,” he says quietly. “Let’s see what happens.”
