DUBAI: “Alone,” a short film co-produced by Egyptian actor Mona Zaki, has been selected for the Female Filmmakers Festival Berlin.
The film’s team announced the selection in a post on Instagram.
The annual Berlin event runs from Oct. 7 to 11 at the Kino Moviemento and programs international shorts and features made by women, alongside music videos, panels and networking sessions.
“Alone” was directed by Egyptian filmmaker Mona Daoud, who co-wrote it with Shahira Galal. Zaki produced it with May Abdel Asim.
The film follows Mady, an older woman with dementia, who denies her condition and believes her daughters have abandoned her, and the caregiver who looks after her while carrying a grief of her own.
It stars Karima Mansour, the Egyptian dancer and choreographer who founded the MAAT Dance Company and the Cairo Contemporary Dance Center, alongside Egyptian actor Latifa Fahmy.
Zaki co-founded HerStory Films with Abdel Asim. It is a company set up to produce work by women in Egypt and the wider Arab world.
“Alone” was developed through the HerStory Films film incubator, in partnership with the Dutch Embassy in Egypt, which has taken 47 projects through development and produced five short films.
“Alone” premiered in April in the short film competition at the fifth Hollywood Arab Film Festival in Los Angeles, which ran from April 17 to 20. It has since been selected by eight festivals and won three awards.
Zaki began acting as a teenager, making her stage debut in “Bel Araby Al-Faseeh” under director Mohamed Sobhi, and went on to lead “Scheherazade Tell Me a Story,” which screened at the Venice Film Festival in 2009. She received the Faten Hamama Excellence Award at the Cairo International Film Festival in 2020, where Mohamed Hefzy, the festival’s president, called her “the quintessential star of her generation.”
Her recent work includes the Arabic-language remake of “Perfect Strangers,” released on Netflix in 2022, and “Flight 404,” which Egypt submitted for the Academy Award for best international feature film in 2024.
In December she played Umm Kulthum in “El Sett,” directed by Marwan Hamed, which premiered at the Marrakech International Film Festival and had its European premiere in Rotterdam.
Zaki is also a brand ambassador for L’Oreal Paris. She walked in the label’s Le Defile — Walk Your Worth show at Paris Fashion Week in 2024, alongside Kendall Jenner and Jane Fonda, and attended the Cannes Film Festival for the brand in 2022 in a gown by Lebanese designer Georges Hobeika.
