TORONTO: Egyptian filmmaker Abu Bakr Shawky’s “The Stories,” which opened this year’s Toronto Arab Film Festival last week, is a love letter of sorts to his homeland, set across three decades from the 1960s to the 1980s.
The film follows Ahmad (Amir El-Masry), an aspiring concert pianist from a middle-class Cairo family, whose life is sent down a different path when his pen-pal correspondence with Elizabeth (Valerie Pachner), a young Austrian woman, blossoms into something more.
What follows is a transcontinental rollercoaster filled with drama, humor and tragedy, unfolding against archival footage of political speeches, football matches, and radio transmissions that trace Egypt’s history alongside Ahmad’s own.
Ahmad’s household is held together by his mother, Fairouz (Nelly Karim, the film’s emotional anchor); a father whose evenings are spent in front of the television alongside a rotating cast of uncles; and two brothers who round out the family’s chaos.
Pachner does what she can with Elizabeth, but the character feels underwritten. The culture shock of an Austrian woman arriving in a chaotic Egyptian household is gestured at through awkward comments and a mother-in-law trope, rather than fully explored.
At other points, Shawky’s fondness for full-circle payoffs, while making for some of the film’s most satisfying moments, tips into cliché — a recurring photograph-with-the-president bit and two faux pas involving the word “corruption.” A farewell-at-the-airport sequence suffers from a similar overfamiliarity, ending exactly how one would expect it to.
Still, missteps aside, “The Stories” is a rich, layered film laced with nostalgia, humor and tenderness. Karim and El-Masry are the standouts across a strong cast, heading a family that muddles through decades of upheaval.
It’s in the small, unassuming scenes where the film really shines: the “p” and “b” mix-ups that come with speaking English as an Arabic speaker; the brothers bickering over “Elizabeth,” Ahmad’s piano rival mocking his “biano”; relatives packed onto a couch screaming through a Zamalek football match, and Fairouz’s fierce possessiveness over her recipes.
The film offers plenty of reasons why one might want to leave Egypt, as Ahmad does at one point. But more importantly, it makes the case that home is where the heart is, as Ahmad returns despite multiple warnings and builds a life — even if it’s not quite the one he once dreamed of.
