Films in shooting or post-production
Safe Exit
Synopsis
Samaan, a young Christian man, works as a security guard in a residential building in downtown Cairo. Quiet and introspective, he spends his nights writing stories and chasing his dream of publishing his first novel. Beneath his calm surface, Samaan carries deep wounds—the lasting effects of chronic PTSD, rooted in the traumatic loss of his father, who was killed in a terrorist attack in Libya during Samaan’s childhood. One day, amid the noise and routine of the city, Samaan crosses paths with Fatima, a young Muslim woman. What begins as a simple encounter soon blossoms into an extraordinary friendship—one that slowly begins to break down the walls Samaan has built around his trauma.
Mohammed El Sharqawy
Dina Farouk
Marawan Waled, Noha Foad, Hazem Essam, Magda Mounir, Samer Al Miniawy
Pareidolia Productions (Egypt)
Kholoud Saad & Mohammed Hammad
Nomadis Image (Tunisia)
Dora Bouchoucha
Ibrahim El Batout
Mad Solutions (Egypt)
Alaa Karkouti
Director’s statement
I remember the day in 2015 when various media broadcast the video of the Libyan ISIS slaughter of 21 Egyptian Christians, a video that was filmed in Hollywood style. The images stayed in my head, and I couldn’t stop searching for the painful details of what happened. This was not the first massacre African and Arab Christians had faced in Egypt and Libya. Today, I still find myself plagued by the questions and issues around the fate of the generation these tragic events have left behind. This is the generation of Samaan, and of his peers who have lived the same tragedy as him, who were children at the time and are now young men in their early 20s. Samaan in this film is a model I have dramatized in my attempt to understand what is behind the idea of killing on religious grounds.
Biographies
Mohammed Hammad is an Egyptian director. He wrote, produced, and directed his debut feature-length film Withered Green (2016), which was selected for the Cineasti del Presente Competition at the Locarno Film Festival and won the Best Director prize at the Dubai International Film Festival.
Kholoud Saad is an Egyptian producer. She has worked in the advertising field for Egyptian companies such as Synergy and I Production, and has worked as an executive producer for several television channels including DMC, CBC, and BBC. Her debut in the film industry was with Mohamed Hammad’s Withered Green (2016) and she won a production award at the Cairo National Film Festival in 2018.
Doha Film Institute
January 2026
