Al ghaba

A handful of kids from broken homes and damaged backgrounds are forced to fend for themselves on the streets of Cairo in this hard-hitting drama. Gamila (Reham Abdel Ghafour) is the de facto leader of a group of homeless young people who scrounge for survival on the bad side of town. Gamila, who is expecting a baby, supports herself by dealing marijuana, but not everyone in her circle is quite so ambitious, and Gamila is given to outbursts of brutal violence. One day during an argument with Bershama (Hanan Motawie), a streetwalker, she attacks the woman with a knife, leading to trouble with the law. Another one of Gamila’s friends, Ramadan (Ahmed Abdel-Qawi), ran away from home rather than take more abuse from his violent father, and now he’s trying to spare his siblings the same fate. And as gangs divide up the territory in Cairo’s slums, Turbine (Bassem Samra), a former gang boss just freed from prison, is determined to claim some new turf. Al-Ghaba (aka Demons of Cairo) was written and directed by Ahmed Atef, and was adapted from his short documentary on the lives of homeless youth in Egypt.