Grief, family and the healing force of film: Egyptian director Namir Abdel Messeeh on his cinematic farewell to his mother in Life After Siham

When Egyptian-French filmmaker Namir Abdel Messeeh's mother died, he picked up the phone and called Nicolas Duchêne, his friend and cameraman, not out of planning or artistic ambition, but out of an urgent instinct. "The day she died," he recalls, "I just knew I needed to film."

What started as a raw, painful attempt to document a funeral slowly became a deeply layered exploration of grief, family, memory, and the strange, healing force of cinema.

Ten years later, the film he thought he would bury forever is complete, and Life After Siham just celebrated its premiere at the 78th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, within the ACID programme for bold independent discoveries.

Having spent his early years in Egypt before moving to France, where he studied directing at La Fémis, Namir Abdel Messeeh directed several short films before turning to more personal subjects with the short You, Waguih, about his father.

His debut documentary feature, The Virgin, the Copts and Me, selected for numerous festivals including Cannes and Berlinale, humorously explores his relationship with his native land and his Coptic family.

Telling the story of his mother and father in Life After Siham, Namir also tells his own, shaping his film with emotional clarity and a deep determination to focus on what truly matters; a focus that is tangible throughout – pacing, editing, and music are all spare but exact, telling only what needs to be told, nothing more.

At its core lies a universal and deeply human quest: the desire to understand one’s predecessors to better understand oneself. This emotional journey is both intimate and widely relatable, especially for those confronting the ageing of their own parents.

But beyond its emotional resonance, the film reveals a thoughtful, deliberate use of cinematic language. The classical film references aren’t merely nostalgic – they’re carefully reworked, serving as part of a distinct creative voice that crafts something original and personal.

Hesitation, instability, writing in the editing

“There was no plan. Just a need. I didn’t think I was making a film,” explains Namir, speaking with conviction. “It was a reaction.”

In the days following his mother Siham’s death, Namir began filming moments with his father Waguih. But the images, once in the edit suite, felt too painful. “I couldn’t imagine an audience connecting with it. It was just too personal, too emotional. So I put it aside,” he shares with The New Arab. 

Years passed, then a close friend and editor visited him. Namir showed him a few minutes of the footage, hesitantly. “There is a film, he said. It’s not just your story. There’s cinema in this material.”

That moment marked the rebirth of the project. With the encouragement of Benoît Alavoine, his editor, Namir teamed up with Camille Laemlé, a producer, and Sonia Moyersoen, a screenwriter. What followed was a journey through fiction, memory, and mourning, layered with doubts, funding rejections, and unexpected revelations.

Originally envisioned as a fiction feature, the project struggled to secure financing. “We were rejected three times by the CNC,” Namir says. “After the third time, I said, ‘Okay, maybe this film shouldn’t exist.”

But the very next morning, he changed his mind. “I woke up and thought: I’m not burying this film. I’ll do it as a documentary. Documentaries are not seen as cinema, and yet they are some of the most creative forms, especially because they’re poor. We have less money, and so we must invent more.”

Six years after the first scenes with his father, Namir picked up the camera again.

As he began to edit, he also began to remember. He revisited older films and dug into family archives. And he started weaving in footage from classic Egyptian cinema, particularly the work of Youssef Chahine – excerpts from his The Return of the Prodigal Son and Dawn of a New Day are carefully selected and deftly interwoven to recreate his parents’ difficult love story.

In the absence of fiction, Namir turned to the cinema of others. “I used Youssef Chahine’s films because I love them, yes – but also because they echo my own story. There’s prison, love, loss, and politics. His images helped me tell the story I couldn’t shoot myself. However, slowly, we realised: maybe nothing is missing. Maybe everything is already there.”

The film gradually took shape in the edit suite.

Exile and abandonment

Alongside the personal, the film brushes up against Egypt’s political history. Namir’s father, once imprisoned under Nasser’s regime for communist affiliations, found himself exiled again — this time economically and ideologically — under Sadat.

“After Nasser died, Sadat came in and shifted toward liberalism. He opened the door to the Islamists and suppressed the left. My father was blacklisted, couldn’t find work, even with a PhD," Namir shares. 

The discrimination wasn’t only political but also religious. “We’re Christians. And in the 70s, that became another barrier.” Waguih, despite being highly educated, was turned away from university posts. “They told him: ‘We have enough Christians here.’”

Therefore, Namir’s father had to leave for Paris, where Siham joined him later, while newborn Namir was left with an aunt in Egypt until the young family gained stability.

“When I was a child, I didn’t understand why my mother left me,” he says. “So I filled the gap with stories. That’s how I started making films.”

That same impulse returned after her death. “Even though I knew physically she was gone, emotionally, I couldn’t process it. She was part of me.” He sees the loss of a parent as a primal rupture. “As children, we believe our parents will never die. When they do, we begin to understand our own mortality. And that’s terrifying.”

Namir continues, “As for my father, I had been seeking love from him all my life, waiting to hear ‘I love you.’ But I didn’t see that he was loving me – just not in the way I expected. His presence, his acceptance of being filmed – that was his love.

"We often look for love in the wrong places, in the wrong forms. And this film helped me understand that. It helped me understand them. It’s as if I met my parents only after they were gone.”

Truths and adulthood

Part of that healing process meant trying to understand his parents' love story – not as a child, but as an adult. “They were people before they became my parents,” Namir says. “I wanted to reconstruct their story, to find my roots again after the trauma of loss.”

But the story, he found, wasn’t fixed. “My mother once told me she wasn’t in love with my father. But her letters say otherwise. So what’s the truth?” He pauses. “Both are true. That’s life. It’s contradictory. That’s why we make movies – to explore that space between versions.”

In the end, the film doesn’t try to resolve the contradictions. “It leaves space for uncertainty,” he says. “And learning to live with uncertainty is part of growing up.”

Cinematic admiration and manipulation

Asked about his artistic inspirations, Namir reveals that Luis Buñuel was his first great influence. “What moved me was his freedom, his surrealism, his humanity.”

Another key figure was Marcel Ophuls. “He was unethical, and I loved that,” Namir laughs. “He mixed war footage with comedies, showed himself manipulating. Cinema is manipulation – the key is to admit it. That honesty stayed with me.”

The reckoning with manipulation — its risks, ethics, and limits — runs through Namir’s film as well. “At one point, my daughter came to the set and was furious. She said, ‘You don’t respect your father’s consent. He doesn’t want to be filmed, and you keep filming him. You and your DOP are dictators.’ I understood her. But I also felt that I was right. There is a purpose to this that goes beyond consent in the moment. That purpose is to understand something deeper. And to share it.”

Namir elaborates further, "I don’t call my film a documentary. It’s a movie. Sometimes I’m the actor, sometimes my father acts. I ask people to play roles. The ladies in the village – I told them, ‘Pretend you don’t want to be filmed.’ So yes, it’s manipulated. It’s a game.”

He smiles again, with the candour of someone who has made peace with contradiction. “At the end, it’s about the deal you make with the viewer. If the deal is clear, the audience will follow you – even through lies, even through play. For me, it’s more a game than a documentary.”

Mariana Hristova is a freelance film critic, cultural journalist, and programmer. She contributes to national and international outlets and has curated programs for Filmoteca De Catalunya, Arxiu Xcèntric, goEast Wiesbaden, etc. Her professional interests include cinema from the European peripheries and archival and amateur films