In the Last Days of the City (Akher Ayam El Madina). 2016. Directed by Tamer El Said

Film

In the Last Days of the City. 2016. Egypt/Germany/Great Britain/United Arab Emirates. Directed by Tamer El Said. Courtesy of Zero Production

In the Last Days of the City (Akher Ayam El Madina). 2016. Egypt/Germany/UK/United Arab Emirates. Directed by Tamer El Said. In Arabic; English subtitles. 118 min.

This film within a film is a haunting yet lyric chronicle of recent years in the Arab world, where revolutions seemed to spark hope for change and yield further instability in one stroke. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Khalid Abdalla (The Kite Runner, The Square) plays the protagonist of Tamer El Said’s ambitious feature debut, a filmmaker in Cairo attempting to capture the zeitgeist of his city as the world changes around him—from personal love and loss to the fall of the Mubarak regime. Throughout, friends send footage and stories from Berlin, Baghdad, and Beirut, creating a powerful, multilayered meditation on togetherness, the tactile hold of cities, and the meaning of homeland. Shot in 2008 and completed this year, the film explores the weight of the cinematic image as record and storytelling in an ongoing time of change.

This film accompanies New Directors/New Films 2016.

Sun, Mar 27, 2016, 4:15 p.m.

MoMA, Floor T1, Theater 1

The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1
Sat, Mar 26, 2016, 1:00 p.m.

Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater

Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].