Hidden Faces

About the Film

When the film crew arrive in the village

– this is where women's rights activist Nawal El Saadawi has initiated a project to promote the financial independence of women - they witnesses a disagreement between Nawal El Saadawi and her assistant. The argument culminates with Nawal El Saadawi slapping her female employee. Rightly so, as Saadawi sees it: the assistant was late for work. The event sets off a process of disillusionment in which the film's supposed main figure fades somewhat into the background and is supplanted by a new and sharpened perspective. Safaa Fathy examines her own family and uncovers a tradition of draconian female subjugation carried over into the present day . Young women caught between tradition and modern, 'Westernized' life

Safaa Fathy's mother

talks about a marriage that was without joy, without friends, and without rights. A wedding day photograph shows a glowing couple dressed in Western clothes, but Safaa's mother hasn't lived like that for a long time. She now covers her head with a veil – part of the imprisonment that her husband had in store for her. Her husband is now dead so her son is now the head of the household and he perpetuates the tradition of patriarchal oppression with harsh cruelty.

No escape

A pattern of repression and open oppression is revealed to Safaa on this journey home. What began with a cosmopolitan openness to the world has been jerked into the backwaters of a dark archaism.