Yomed­dine – first look review

There was some hope­ful curios­i­ty when Egypt­ian debut fea­ture Yomed­dine was announced as part of the Cannes com­pe­ti­tion line-up. Based on NYU-grad­u­ate direc­tor AB Shawky’s short film The Colony, which fol­lows a group of lep­ers in Egypt, this ambi­tious film focus­es on Beshay (Rady Gamal), a fortysome­thing man suf­fer­ing from the dis­ease. It’s a human per­spec­tive rarely rep­re­sent­ed in cinema.

No longer con­ta­gious but dis­fig­ured and his limbs atro­phied, Beshay makes mon­ey by painstak­ing­ly sell­ing var­i­ous items he sal­vages from pub­lic dumps, and finds com­pa­ny in the lep­er colony where he lives, as well as in Oba­ma (Ahmed Abdel­hafiz), a young boy from the local orphan­age. When his (also afflict­ed) wife pass­es away, Bashey decides to head south in search of the fam­i­ly who aban­doned him as a child. Nat­u­ral­ly, the lone­ly Oba­ma fol­lows him.

By hav­ing Bashey jour­ney across Egypt on his wonky cart, Shawky is able to demon­strate the pow­er of man’s will against dis­crim­i­na­tion and hard­ship, and to defend lep­ers’ right to be part of soci­ety. When a series of mishaps leads to Bashey being hand­cuffed to a healthy man, his con­di­tion ini­tial­ly dis­turbs the oth­er inmate. Yet after they man­age to escape togeth­er, Bashey under­stands that a new prej­u­dice threat­ens him: he must hide his Chris­tian­i­ty from the Mus­lim man who saved him. Per­haps lep­rosy doesn’t have to close him off the wider world.

Yet as the film tedious­ly goes on, Bashey and Oba­ma find more com­fort in the wide nat­ur­al expans­es and in each oth­er than in any encounter with healthy, ​‘reg­u­lar’ peo­ple. Over-scored sun­lit mon­tages try to con­vey a sense of glee­ful aban­don as the prospect of accep­tance slow­ly fades away. To dimin­ish­ing returns, Bashey even ner­vous­ly screams ​“I’m a human being!” on a busy train car­riage. Only when a group of crip­pled men lend Bashey and Oba­ma a hand do they appre­ci­ate their con­tact with soci­ety – and these men advise them nev­er to hope to be treat­ed as ​“nor­mal.”

The moral of humil­i­ty and iso­la­tion that Shawky blunt­ly forces into the nar­ra­tive defies all expec­ta­tions, but not to a pos­i­tive effect. Stick­ing to your kind might be a real­is­tic and mea­sured deci­sion for Bashey and Oba­ma to make, giv­en Egypt’s appar­ent dis­in­ter­est in help­ing its more unfor­tu­nate cit­i­zens. Shawky nev­er­the­less refus­es to high­light the gov­ern­ment and the culture’s respon­si­bil­i­ty towards its lep­ers and orphans, instead admit­ting defeat and mak­ing both out­casts hap­py to have been on this jour­ney, but hap­pi­er still to nev­er again hope for better.