The Free Voice of Egypt

Nawal El Saadawi is well-known the world over as a writer and feminist. She is one of the most important champions of the women’s movement in her Egyptian homeland and indeed in the whole of the Arab world. In almost fifty novels, plays and short stories, her writing opposes violence against women, sexual oppression and poverty. Nawal El Saadawi has often been touted as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature and in America she has been decorated as a “Great Mind of the 21st Century”. But Nawal El Saadawi is also a psychiatric doctor. Filled to the brim with books, travel souvenirs and awards from around the globe, her small flat on the 26th floor of a modest apartment building also serves as a clinic for the psychiatrist who is now past her eightieth birthday. A refuge which offers a feeling of security, high above Cairo’s roofs. Here, the private becomes political.

The documentary charts the most important stages in the life of this extraordinary woman – a woman who risked her life for her convictions more than once, a woman who never gave up her mission despite death threats from fundamentalists and unspeakable conditions at the women’s prison under President Sadat. Nawal El Saadawi’s biography encompasses more than eight decades of contemporary Egyptian history as experienced from a female perspective. She is thrown back to her childhood when we leave the intimate setting of her “writer´s refuge” above the roofs of the metropolis and are taken out to the village in which Nawal was born, where she too had to endure the terrible experience of genital mutilation at first hand. We find images of the past in images of the present, people from yesteryear in the here and now. We weave an autobiographic first person narrative into the documentary observations and real encounters of our female protagonist. Original quotations from Nawal El Saadawi’s autobiographical works do not only highlight her own striking biography that has outlived so many social and political ruptures. They indicate also that it is not just a matter of one woman’s life. This is the reality of life as experienced by millions of women under masculine authority – from King Farouk to Nasser, from Sadat and Mubarak to Mohammed Morsi, and finally the current military regime.

From this dramaturgical interplay between past and present there emerges through the film a feminine view of the dramatic situation in present-day Egypt which shows in a vivid and historically contextualized manner, the non-negotiable demands of Egypt’s women – and that irrespective of what the current political ruler is called.