Mohammad Saved From the Waters
Safaa Fathy
2012 - 93 min - XDCAM - Couleur - France, Allemagne

"Mohammad Saved from the Waters" is the story of the youngest of my brothers and sisters who passed away last year of kidney failure, although there was a treatment: a transplant. But Mohammad refused this, because according to his beliefs the body of a donor isn’t the donor’s own, to sell or to offer. It belongs to God.
It is about the whole of Egypt which suffers from brutal and incompetent hospitals, and pollution of the air, food and water. The film is also about healing in spite of death: the healing of Mahmoud and Ziad (Mohammad’s sons), my healing as an eldest sister. It is about victims and how they became so; about resistance and about how we survive. We have all been graced by the upheaval of the Egyptian revolution. Mohammad who once dreamt of civil disobedience (as I learnt after his death) has had his dream come true.
The film is my brother’s journey through life and after his life. It shows the dynamics of our story as an Egyptian family touched by collective issues, how we failed to rescue the youngest and the most beloved among us from perishing in the waters of his own body. It shows how the sacrifice of the young becomes redemption (as for the many sacrificed during the revolution).
The story is built both in narrative and image with different material (Mohammad alive, after his life) and timeframes. The film starts with Mohammad before the revolution and continues without him after the revolution. It reveals aspects of his own life and hidden areas of the Egyptian context that came out into the open once he was gone, once the old Egyptian regime was gone. It is the story of a man who was once a young man related to the story of change in Egypt itself.
The film starts in his lifetime and continues after his life in a changed Egypt. It talks about how the collective circumstances sent a beloved young man to a painful destiny right in front of our eyes, which became a camera in order to save a least his image and voice. It is about how my brother’s fate is related to hundreds of thousands of others who suffer from the same kidney failure.
It tries to unpick the inextricable issues of bioethics, dignity of the weak and the sick, grief and healing. Healing not only of his own sons and family but also the process of healing of the entire civilisation of Egypt.