Abo Zaabal 89

Bassam Mortada was five years old when he first visited his father Mahmoud in the notorious Abo Zaabal prison. With the police raid still fresh in his mind, his experience was dominated by incomprehension. But in the years that followed, resentment took hold.

Bassam was raised by his mother Fardous, a socialist activist herself. As a single parent, her life was hard, and when Mahmoud was finally released from prison he seemed like a different person. He left for Vienna, and for a second time she was left behind, this time embittered. Bassam grew alienated from both, suppressing his own trauma and confusion.

In this documentary, he films his efforts to renew and restore relationships with his parents and find a path to historical truth, emotional comprehension and psychological healing, as he tries to reconstruct how his parents’ political activism has shaped their family. Through conversations with his parents and their friends, the cassette tapes his father sent from Vienna, a theatrical monologue by his father’s best friend, newspaper archives and found footage, he shows the impact of the “big” history of Egypt on the “small” history of his family.