What happens if one no longer has the capacity to imagine?
This was the question that stirred visual artist and filmmaker Hala El Koussy when she first started conceptualizing her second feature film, East of Noon (2024). That, and a vision she had of a woman sitting on an ornate chair in the middle of the sea.
East of Noon is a fable about a community that lives “in the back of the world, out of time.” The residents exist in perpetual fear, which has broken their minds’ ability to wander: a natural consequence when those whose legs dare to take them beyond the walls of the enclave always end up dead, shoved inside a sack and buried under the thick cloak of night.
Young men from the community are enlisted to do the burying. One of them is Abdo (Omar Roziq), the film’s protagonist, who — while digging a hole for the newest body, and in an outburst of rage — breaks his shovel in two. Later, Abdo is interrogated about the incident by Chief Borai (Osama Abu al-Ata), the regime’s henchman: keeper of the enclave’s law and order, arbiter of death and disappearance. Resourcefully and with more than a hint of defiance, Abdo claims he didn’t intentionally break the shovel: it broke upon hitting treasure.
Chief Borai scoffs at his joke, but the truth is, Abdo isn’t lying. In the same moment, he found his rage and activated his imagination — this convergence is where the real treasure lies; where his journey of liberation begins.
Abdo lives with his grandmother, Galala (Menha Batraoui), whose spacious house, with its vast assortment of idiosyncratic objects, doubles as a shop where the townspeople come to barter. Most of the time, she is seated on her singular chair, woven out of bamboo stalks, at a large wooden desk adorned with odds and ends — brass cups, ceramic plates, leather pouches — and behind her, the centerpiece of the space: a giant wall of clocks that have long stopped working. Galala, we come to realize, is a guardian of memory. She is old enough to remember life before time came to a halt. She doesn’t only trade in objects; she sells stories. That is the third function of her house: it is where the community, particularly its children, comes to listen to tales of the sea, a mythical entity they’ve never seen and only Galala knows.
Abdo, meanwhile, doesn’t buy into his grandmother’s performances. His only outlet is music, which he makes using an intricate assemblage of salvaged domestic items: pots and pans, a pair of slippers, straw baskets. Unlike the parables spun by Galala, steeped in the mystifying language of myths, Abdo’s songs are raw and immediate, a mixture of cyclical beats, spoken word and remixed speeches given by an authoritarian we have yet to meet. Abdo’s music is an extension and an expression of his restlessness. He may not have seen anything beyond the confines of his hometown, but he instinctively knows there is more out there: “I’m not an undertaker!” he yells at his grandmother one day. When she recommends patience, he says patience is a grave. She speaks of imagination as an antidote to reality — but Abdo is not interested in escapism.
For this, it gradually becomes clear, is the true purpose of Galala’s stories. In collusion with the town’s ruling sovereign, and in exchange for the safety of her grandson — whose impertinence, she knows, would otherwise put him at risk — Galala keeps the townspeople distracted, alleviating their boredom and misery to hold dissent and despair at bay. After all, despair — as the film makes clear, and as we saw in our own “winter of discontent” — can birth the most dangerous form of dissent. The greatest threat to the enclave’s status quo is repeated displays of despair: suicide attempts where the victim is always stopped before crossing the threshold, branded “an ingrate” and punished for it.
It is no coincidence that we are introduced to the sovereign, Shawky the Showman (Ahmed Kamal), only after we become acquainted with the two arms that sustain his regime: force and rhetoric, embodied respectively in Borai and Galala. Shawky is a performer, both onstage and off. The townspeople are obligated to attend his shows and applaud at the end of his musical numbers. He is also the sole owner of the means of production: nobody else has access to musical instruments except for his band. To appease Galala, who can’t be bought by sugar cubes — the town’s most coveted currency, used to reward a loyal subject or bribe a skeptic into becoming one — Shawky offers Abdo a place in his orchestra. In truth, it is an attempt to contain his creative energy and bring him into the fold.
But Shawky fails. After witnessing — and nearly committing — a horrific act of violence backstage, Abdo is spurred into action. He plots escape with a new friend, Nunna (Fayza Shamah), a sex worker exploited by Borai and his goons. Nunna is pregnant and adamant on raising her child elsewhere. She, Koussy says — referencing her 2017 debut — is the quintessential “cactus flower,” capable of blossoming under the harshest circumstances. This elaboration is made after an audience member, in the post-screening discussion, wonders why we never see Nunna’s anger until the very end, despite the abuse she endures. In Arabic, the word for cactus is ṣabbār, meaning “one who is exceedingly patient.” For Nunna, patience doesn’t negate anger; it incubates it: like a womb nurturing a fetus to term.
The filmgoer’s comment is important because it raises questions about the film’s tone. Although it is a relatively common approach in dystopian fantasies like East of Noon, the film’s deadpan sensibility — particularly in scenes involving atrocities such as murder or rape — was bound to leave some viewers unsettled. The absence of sentimentality may come across as emotional detachment, the dry humor may translate as a lack of seriousness. However, these tonal choices serve Koussy’s painstaking process of world-building. In the suspended realm where the film’s events take place, the people know nothing else; they aren’t easily susceptible to shock or self-pity. Their tragedy is matter-of-fact.
Shot in black and white on 16mm film by cinematographer Abdel Salam Moussa, East of Noon is also visually true to its characters’ reality, one that is in so many ways unreal. There are obvious reasons as to why the director would choose to deprive such a world of color, but coupled with the medium’s texture — grainy rather than crisp — the black and white imagery does more than suggest limitation; it envelops the film in a mist of sorts, creating a distance that renders it not austere but dream-like. Color is confined only to two scenes depicting what the characters can’t see and can only conjure up in their mind’s eye: namely, the sea. In one such scene, musical instruments rise from the water’s surface like sturdy reed stalks or watchful monsters. Here, the sea is a metaphor for the imagination; it is where the unattainable grows and claims space.
Another function the 16mm fulfills is that it lends the film a handcrafted, almost primordial quality crucial to its conceptual integrity. Throughout East of Noon, we are reminded time and again that the residents of the enclave are a people with meagre audiovisual references and scarce technological means. The soundtrack, including the music made by Abdo, was created over five years by sound designer Abdel Rahman Mahmoud and music composer Ahmed El Sawy using everyday objects to replicate the material conditions of the characters’ environment. Against such an unembellished soundscape, the clinical sharpness of digital, or even the lush density of 35mm film, would likely feel jarring.
Yet, in her portrayal of this unmoored world, Koussy’s work is itself rooted in cultural tradition. Rhetorically, the film emphasizes the centrality of storytelling, particularly its oral forms, in the psychological and political formation of communities. Narratively, the Egyptian variant of this practice is its very vessel, palpable in the vocabulary used by Galala — an anchor of the community, and of the film — as well as her rhythm, her intonation. This integrally colloquial spirit extends to the residents’ age-old, distinctly Egyptian strategies of resisting surveillance. A group of youths, for instance, devise their own language in which words are spoken in reverse, ensuring that only insiders can understand what is being said: a technique once popular among school girls — decades ago — when talking about boys and other secrets, to avoid detection by parents or teachers.
More generally, the film’s depiction of the young — their boldness, their resilience, their caprice — bears the unmistakable influence of Youssef Chahine, once described by late actor Nour al-Sherif as “Egyptian cinema’s most youthful director,” although he was well into his sixties at the time. It is hard to watch Abdo impersonate Shawky with such theatrical exaggeration, for example, and not recall Yahia (Mohsen Mohieddine) channeling Hamlet in Alexandria… Why? (1979), or to see him dance in abandon with Nunna as they plan for escape, framed by a window in the darkness, without envisioning the silhouetted forms of Ibrahim and Tafida (Hisham Selim and Majida al-Roumi) against the rising sun as they flee their own fictional village of Meet Shaboura in The Return of the Prodigal Son (1976).
Abdo himself, like the rest of the residents, has no cinematic heroes to emulate. Yet in one scene he strolls through the local market in a trenchcoat, documenting sounds on his tape recorder with a fedora on his head and a mischievous look in his eyes, and — although this may not be intentional — what comes to mind is Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), standing before a movie poster and trying to mimic Humphrey Bogart. Poiccard, unlike Abdo, is a character with an idol. Yet in Breathless, Godard centers Hollywood only to upend everything it represents — and, in a way, this is what Abdo ultimately does with his recordings. His final act is far grander than escape: he orchestrates a revolt by appropriating the ruler’s own voice, on the regime’s own channel. A live broadcast is made, announcing that treasure has been found. And when the townspeople start digging and find a mass grave instead, nothing can ever be the same.
It has long been established, in certain circles at least, that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Abdo’s political sleight of hand, like Godard’s cinema, invites us to think again. The decisive factor is not the tools themselves, because tools can be repurposed, reinvented, reimagined. That was Godard’s philosophy when it came to the moving image, distilled in his oft-cited adage about where you take things from and where you take them to. In East of Noon, entertainment is a weapon wielded by the oppressor, but once deconstructed and recontextualized, the sovereign’s spectacle becomes a key in the hands of the oppressed.
If Abdo’s action is consciously rebellious, Koussy’s gesture — the film itself — is more reflexive. By confronting the power of storytelling and entertainment to either sustain or subvert structures of power, she acknowledges her position as a filmmaker, examining the weight of creating under authority: she holds her own work up to scrutiny. This self-awareness is felt even in the film’s pacing, which is deliberately sluggish. Once again, it is dramatically logical — this is a town where time has stopped; the only functioning clock is owned by Shawky, and even that one breaks — but it doesn’t make for a particularly enjoyable viewing experience. It is as though Koussy is actively resisting the kind of acceleration and compression that, more often than not, culminate in unearned catharsis. The issue then becomes not one of liberation, but of responsibility.
East of Noon is a film whose impact lands long after the credits have stopped rolling. In the final shot, we are treated to the vast, blue expanse of the sea. An array of residents bathe in the water, their movements subtle, economical. Ethereal as the composition feels, the shot lingers, and lingers, and lingers. One can almost sense other viewers in the theater fidget uneasily in their seats. A friend whispers: “Is there a reason why the film isn’t ending?”
It is only weeks later that the answer materializes. Freedom has been won. The sea is real, it is no longer a figment of the imagination. Its persistence onscreen is a message: this, in itself, cannot be the end. The seeming endlessness of that shot — and of its subject — dares us to imagine. It poses a painful question, and leaves us with it:
Now what?
