By Kaleem Aftab, Berlin International Film Festival 2013

“Coming Forth by Day is a very personal film based on a true story,” says Egyptian director Hala Lotfy. “I was trying to imitate reality. Originally I was a documentary filmmaker. In this film I was trying to find the cinematic equivalent of what real life feels like.”

Life moves at the pace of a broken down car in Coming Forth by Day. The claustrophobic opening features long takes of Soad in her family apartment on the outskirts of Cairo, where she spends most of her time helping her mother look after her wheelchair-bound father. At with the films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan the glacial pace makes even the smallest movement from the dripping of a tap to the sound of a radio take on heightened significance. Yet in keeping with her filmmaking philosophy, Lotfy argues, “The long takes for example were not an aesthetic choice. I did not put them into the film to look stylish. I put them in to try and resonate with the tempo of the life of these characters. So it was the story that urged us to be slow, for the first two thirds of the film we are trapped in a flat and we cannot go anywhere. The last part Soad goes out of the apartment and it’s much faster.”

Born in 1973, Lotfy studied political science in Cairo before taking a filmmaking course at the Cairo Institute, graduating in 1999. She made two documentary films and some short narrative films before working for Al Jazeera making a seven part series called Arabs in Latin America. Now though her mind is occupied by stories taking place in her native land.

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For the last two years nearly every film from Egypt shown at a film festival has been born out of the events in Tahrir Square, so it’s nice to see the Berlin Film Festival embrace a more diverse range of Middle East tales. Lotfy is happy about this change in attitude; “On a panel that I was on at this festival, we were talking about how the West and the big film markets should allow ourselves to present ourselves in the way we believe is proper, not just by consuming all of the products about the Arab spring. The Arab spring movement produced some really bad films that made you wish the revolutions didn’t happen. They were really pointless and time will no doubt wash them away, they will not last for long.”