Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story

Heba presents a television programme in Egypt. She invites women onto it and asks them to say the things they do not say: marriage, violence, prison, stories that get silenced. As the broadcasts catch on, her husband's job comes under threat, because to get ahead he has to stay close to those in power. The pressure at home turns back onto the programme itself. Yousry Nasrallah's film carries the narrative structure of the Thousand and One Nights into the present: each woman who comes on Heba's programme tells her own story, and the film goes inside those stories. Mona Zaki plays Heba. It caused argument in Egypt; what was discussed was as much its showing of what women live through as its showing of the price of telling it.