The Cow’s Complaint

Ali Al Gazzar – a Sufi sculptor – encounters a visitation at midday. The guest spurs Ali to return to his creations, igniting him with the spiritual imagination of Sufi peasants, peripheral objects and rural animals in Cairo’s City of the Dead.

Mahdy Abo Bahat and Abo Zin Eldin broke into new territory in 2023 with The Goose’s Excuse (Ozr El Wezzah, Cinéma du réel 2024). Images appeared, sound signals resonated, and the depths of ages surged up towards us, bathing what seemed real in a light from who knows where. 
Yesterday’s apologetic goose and today’s complaining cow are now an integral part of this ensemble which, from the start, views imagination as a human perception that complements our five senses and hones our understanding of the world. The film thus opens by recalling the 2014 disappearance of a young man with his camera, followed two years later by the appearance of “a device with an electric hum”, speaking to humans, animals and objects with its “mechanical forked tongue”. A device that a reasonably imaginative spectator could immediately connect to the strange rattling camera that lingers on the film’s characters – one of whom is endlessly picking up and sorting discarded objects in his shabby room whilst others chat about cryptic topics while puffing on their hookahs. 
In a second movement, the filmmakers – haunted by the dregs of history, shadows from the past, the forgotten worlds that have yet to emerge or already completely vanished – channel the flows of the universal web between heaven and earth, the dead and the living: a circulation of presences and absences, prayers, songs, beams and vapours that the film reveals, like a vessel probing another world.

Christian Borghino