AFAC Film Night: Um Ghayeb, Mother of the Unborn

Um Ghayeb: Mother of the Unborn
Dir. Nadine Salib, 2014
Color, 84’

In a forgotten corner of Egypt lives a woman yearning for a child. Having no option but to live on the fringe of her community because of her infertility, Hanan lingers between a dream slowly slipping away and her struggle to find a place where she belongs. While everything that surrounds her is weighed with fertility and mortality, she wonders how to give meaning to the time that she has in between. The film is a nuanced and moving portrait of a barren woman in rural Egypt.

Nadine Salib graduated with a BFA in Film studies from the IAMS in 2006. She started her career as an assistant director, where she worked as a first assistant and script supervisor in many short and feature length films. Salib worked closely with many independent Egyptian filmmakers, such as Ibrahim ElBatout in Winter of Discontent, which premiered in Venice Film Festival in 2011 and Tamer El said in In the Last Days of the City, which premiered in Berlin in 2016. In 2012 she directed her first short documentary Fagr or Dawn, which won the second prize in the Arab women filmmakers competition in the Baghdad International Film Festival and the 1st prize in the 12th Goethe independent Film Festival in Egypt. Salib took part in many filmmaking workshops such as Durban Talent Campus in 2011, the Documentary Campus in 2012 and the IDFA summer Academy in 2014. Um Ghayeb: Mother of the Unborn is her first feature-length documentary, it premiered in IDFA 2014, and won the Peter Wintonick Special Jury Award for First Appearance competition and the FIPRESCI for best documentary in Abu Dhabi Film Festival 2014. It was also awarded the best documentary in the Afrycam Film Festival and in the Mizna Twin cities. Um Ghayeb: Mother of the Unborn also received a special mention in Medfilm festival iand the Arab Latin Film Festival. Um Ghayeb: Mother of the Unborn was selected in many international festivals such as the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, Carthage Film Festival, Sheffield Documentary Film Festival, Transylvania international film festival, and Yamagata Film Festival in Japan.