Life After Siham (documentary) ★★½

He would want for life to be a movie, says Namir Abdel Masseeh in one heartbreaking scene of his intimate documentary, which feels like a conceptual translation of that wish. By uttering it, the Franco-Egyptian director doesn’t express a desire for adventure or excitement, but rather regret. If life were one of his films, he could re-shoot it. Change a scene, change the dialogue, or just rewind to the time before a painful event, like the personal loss that became the starting point of his cinematic elegy. After the sudden death of his mother, Siham, who appears on screen in footage the director shot of her over the course of several years, Messeeh confronts both loss and a creative impasse. 

As he embarks on a process of mourning that becomes an act of radical remembrance and rediscovery, personal grief transforms into a tribute to memory, family, and the evocative power of moving images. Their emotional weight is underscored by Masseeh’s insistence to have a friend film her funeral. The existential event marking a seismic shift in the director’s life is also the necessary conclusion of his capturing her on handheld camera footage throughout her life. At the same time, Life After Siham is the fulfillment of a promise Masseeh gave his mother when she was still alive: one day, they would make a film together. When she passed, he started to work through the old home videos while simultaneously shooting new scenes.  

Siham’s vibrant personality, so it seems, breaks the mold of a traditional documentary. Hence, Messeeh expands his tribute to her into a multi-textural hybrid, combining the home video footage with scripted scenes depicting moments from Siham’s youth and earlier years, excerpts from Yusuf Chahine‘s The Return of the Prodigal Son – an Egyptian classic from the mid-70s, mixing political commentary with family melodrama – as well as present-day scenes of his father, Waguih Abdel Messeeh, and him processing her death and recalling her life. Old photographs, letters, and anecdotes evoke her presence while making her absence all the more palpable. Personal trinkets are suddenly precious relics of a life which, as Masseeh realizes, he only half knew. 

In conversation with his father, who was himself gravely ill at the time and would die soon after, he learns not only elemental things about Siham but also about his father. Waguih Abdel Masseeh used to be an actor, a fact he never mentioned to his son before. The deeply personal collage reveals its universal aspects in details like this: the realization that parents have a whole different life before they become parents, and that some children never inquire or even think about that life. Discovering these unknown biographies that were never hidden, only slowly giving in to oblivion, comes with a unique thrill but also the gnawing regret of being too late to ask all the questions arising with this discovery.

The fragments from Chahine’s Prodigal Son, with its parabolical plot about the shattered revolutionary dreams after Gamal Abdel Nasser’s reign, serve as a fictional substitute for his parents’ experiences of exile and political persecution. This mélange reconstructs the wider historical context embedded in his parents’ lives, marked by dislocation, detours, and disillusionment. Black-and-white archival frames, videos of family gatherings, static shots capturing silence, re-imagined biographical vignettes, and the grainy scenes from old movies assemble into a visually vibrant, thematically complex negotiation with loss. Geographical and generational displacement, memory and imagination, and the role of film in relation to all these are constant thematic undercurrents of this experimental eulogy. Its scattered subjectivity can be exhausting, but it is also what makes it engaging.