Short film “Love, Dad” is shot in Manshiyet Nasir, a location of epic poverty near Cairo, and is about fatherly love in a narrative of sacrifice. Via Short of the Week:
The film is shot in Manshiyet Nasir, a location of epic poverty near Cairo where over 60% of the city’s waste is processed. 25 years ago something unexpected happened in the midst of this misery, a school started right in the heart of the area. While an opportunity for a leg up, and the potential to break out of a generational cycle of poverty, the proposition of enrolling a child in this school was by no means a simple one for residents. For families barely surviving in “Garbage City”, the loss of a child’s labor had immediate short term consequences. Still, the schools came to thrive, and their founder Maggie Gobran would go on to garner worldwide fame and multiple Nobel Prize nominations for her efforts.
The germ of a story about Garbage City and its schools was developed by The Bittersweet Foundation, a non-profit story shop dedicated to telling ‘counter-narratives’ told from multiple angles. Executive Producer Kate Schmidgall and Managing Director Dave Baker had been going after this specific story for the better part of six years, and brought in Bray to tell a documentary of Gobran’s life and work. Bray decided he wanted to approach things from a different direction though, and, while on the ground at the location, heard the story of a young girl, one of Gobran’s first students in fact, who went on to medical school in Canada. For Bray, the story “exemplified the entire struggle the people of Garbage City face everyday, and the brave parents that took a risk on education.” Thus, Bray decided to refocus the film on dramatizing the efforts of this young woman, and the sacrifice of her father to believe in her and secure the opportunity.