In this stirring elegy for a desolate Cairo from Emmy-winning cinematographer-turned-director Muhammed Hamdy, mint is sprouting from the bodies of a tormented generation of dreamers, attracting moving shadows that chase people through the streets.
Once alive with the promise of change, Muhammed Hamdy’s Cairo is a sweet-smelling city of ghosts. The Emmy-winning Egyptian cinematographer of The Square (TIFF ’13 winner of the People’s Choice Documentary Award), makes his directorial debut with a dark and formally rich poetic ode to the walking dead and those cursed to remember them.
Bahaa (Alaa El Din Hamada), a broken-hearted physician, sits in a daze awaiting his next patient when his friend Mahdy (Mahdy Abo Bahat) appears. Sprouting mint leaves peek out from behind his curls as he explains to the doctor that smoking hashish is the only thing that stops it from growing. If left unattended the sprouts fortify into full blown plants, their aroma beckoning to the moving shadows that chase people throughout the city’s deteriorating streets and into forsaken buildings. Now that Mahdy’s stash has run out, he’ll have nowhere to hide. The two men together drift in and out of haunted homes, freshly scented with last rites and lingering fears, looking for one more reprieve with their former companions, unprepared for what they might find.
The work of a skilled painter with light and shadow, Perfumed with Mint is thick with atmosphere and allegory marking a fascinating new voice in African and Arab cinema. Sedated and nearly non-narrative, Hamdy’s film captures the tranquilized paranoia of a wounded generation tormented by what they cannot forget and what they refuse to surrender.
NATALEAH HUNTER-YOUNG
Content advisory: depictions of suicide; drug use
Screenings
Scotiabank 5
Scotiabank 10
Scotiabank 9
Scotiabank 5