I was eight when I first learnt about the October 6 War, Egypt’s great triumph in modern history, fought in 1973.
My father – baba as I call him – spoke about it with so much pride. I can still see the smile on his face.
Gedo, my grandfather, gave me fragments of what he remembered from his time as a mechanical engineer working on the BM-21 Grad rocket launchers.
Every year, around the anniversary of the war, my Arabic teacher would give us an essay to write about the triumph. We learnt how to write about victory before we fully processed it.
This portrayal was challenged in high school by my history professor. My classmates were furious with him. How dare this white French man challenge the history of our own country?
He introduced accounts that did not fit with the ones we had known. At the time, we saw this less as an invitation to reconsider history than as an intrusion into something that was deeply ours.
Years later, I met the actor Amir El-Masry at an Egyptian restaurant in Cairo’s affluent Zamalek district. It was not long after his role as a young Mohamed Al-Fayed in The Crown.
I asked him for a selfie. He seemed decent, and I realise now that I followed his career after that encounter as much because of it as for his talent.
So when The Stories, Egypt’s 2027 Oscars submission in which he plays the lead, came out, I was impatient to watch it.
The film made me think about questions I had never asked. Abu Bakr Shawky’s semi-autobiographical anthology drama throws us into the loud, unruly world of Ahmed – played by El-Masry – an aspiring pianist, from its very first scene.
His music, classical symphonies, plays against the noise of a family trying to navigate Egypt’s shifting political landscape from the late 1960s to the 1980s.
At some point, Cairo stops being the backdrop to Ahmed’s family story and becomes one of its protagonists.
It is about a warm love story that develops between Ahmed and his Austrian pen pal, Elizabeth, or “Liz” as he calls her.
The Stories is not about major plot twists or heroic revelations. It lies in the cracks of day-to-day life, the heartbreak of losing a loved one, in the rituals of a family, and in the fears and aspirations that rarely appear in a history textbook. These are the stories of a regular family navigating Egypt.
And I started to reflect on my own.
The film felt like an invitation to look at the fragments of the bigger picture. It was an invitation to look at the details that get lost between the dates and the battles.
I had never asked Gedo what it felt like to leave his wife and toddler to go to war.
I had never asked my grandmother what she had to leave behind when she fled her home city of Suez in 1967 - the year of El Naksa – the year of the Six-Day War with Israel.
I also had never asked either of them whether they were scared. Whether they were worried or what they thought might happen next.
Those big emotions can disappear behind military marches and national slogans. The story of victory can become so large that there is little room left for the people who lived through it.
That is what I realised after watching The Stories. I had learnt the history. I just hadn't asked enough about the people who lived it – and by the time I knew which questions to ask, it was a bit too late.
