The Last Letter to Nasser (2023 – Documentary)

A Jury Special Mention at the Luxor African Film Festival.

In her essay film, Fayza Harby opens Pandora’s box, which initially means time itself. It is said that history is written by its winners. But the buried history of the Nubians in Egypt actually only knew losers. Even their usurper, the Egyptian president at the time of their forced resettlement in the mid-1960s, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was ultimately one of them.

From 2015, the filmmaker visits the Nubian woman Tahra, who has been preserving history since the resettlement. She refused early on to move into the houses and settlements that Nasser had planned for the Nubians – and ended up living in a village built by Nasser’s successor Saddat by the reservoir, where the flooded villages of the Nubians lay at her feet. Tahra’s inner image of preserving her culture with the few means at her disposal and her perceived failure to do so – the film seeks an expression for this image, telling details of a frugal, forgotten life.

This also opens up the space; the film brings Tahra and Nasser together in an imaginary exchange of letters, in which the director also takes part.