RODRIGO BRUM & SAMA WALY
Rodrigo Brum
Dates of residency: July till August 2019
Born: 1987
Nationality: Brazilian
Lives and works: Cairo and Rio de Janeiro
Education:
MA Philosophy, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
MFA Film, Video, New Media and Animation, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Selected screenings:
2020 Cinema Secreto, Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Ramallah
2019 Paseo de Olla, Art Museum of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis
2017 Cinema Secreto, EXPO Chicago, Chicago
2016 Rehearsal, Index Art Center, Newark
THE FILMMAKER
Rodrigo Brum is a Brazilian filmmaker, currently based in Cairo. He recently directed his first feature documentary, Like Someone Who Hears a Very Sad Song currently in post-production. In Cairo, he is working on his second feature-length, My Father Looks Like Hassan Fathy. In addition, he is part of the team of Ambient Light, a production company based in Egypt, where he is currently producing the feature documentary Za’atari Captains, directed by Ali Elarabi, and the documentary Warda: l’algérienne, directed by Souheila Battou. His work has been supported by several grants and fellowships, most recently the Graham Foundation Grant in 2019. Brum has taught philosophy and filmmaking in institutions in Brazil, United States, Cape Verde, and Egypt, where he worked as a visiting fellow at the Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences.
New Gourna, Luxor, Egypt, ca. 1950. Courtesy of Hassan Fathy Archives, Rare Books and Special Collections Library, American University in Cairo.
Sama Waly
Dates of residency: July till August 2019
Born: 1990
Nationality: Egyptian
Lives and works: Cairo, Egypt
Education:
2017 MFA Film, Video, New Media and Animation, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
THE FILMMAKER
Sama Waly lives and works in Cairo. She received her MFA in Film, Video, New Media and Animation from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her first feature-length documentary My Father Looks Like Hassan Fathy received the Graham Foundation grant in 2019 for development and presentation. Since 2011, she has exhibited and published her work in Cairo, Chicago, and internationally.
THE RESIDENCYAt BAR, Brum and Waly continued working on their feature-length project My Father Looks Like Hassan Fathy which investigates events that led Egyptian state authorities to demolish the old Egyptian village of Gourna. Seven thousand Gournese have been relocated to a public housing project, accused of having built their homes atop the ancient tombs on the Theban Necropolis, and subsequently making tomb-raiding an age-old tradition. It has taken the government over a century to free the land for archeological research and in the late 1950s the Department of Antiquities commissioned Hassan Fathy—who would later become Egypt’s most famous architect—to build a model village to lure the villagers. A few months into building, Fathy’s new village flooded and the project halted, remaining incomplete to this day. Seventy years later, the architect Tarek Waly, a former disciple of Hassan Fathy, dreams of rehabilitating Fathy’s village.