cinematography
Douwe Hennink
editing
Dieter Diependaele
sound
Taco Drijfhout
production design
Clara Bragdon
costumes
Nada Adel

cast
Reem Amer (Amal)
Fatma Ibrahim El-Hamus (Fatma)
Nadia Ahmed El-Hadary (Nadia)
Asmaa Ahmed El-Hadary (Asmaa)
Farida Alsayed El-Hamus (Farida)
Fatma Farahat El-Hadary (Teta)
Sara Ali El-Hadary (Sara)

production
BALDR Film
co-productions
Seera Films
CZAR Film
producer
Frank Hoeve
co-producers
Kesmat Elsayed
Eurydice Gysel

in collaboration with
KRO-NCRV
with the support of
Netherlands Film Fund
CoBO
Belgian Tax Shelter
BNP Paribas Fortis Film Finance
Creative Europe Media
Red Sea Fund

Pregnant Amal lives together with her family in Al Baraneya, a village outside Cairo, surrounded by jasmine fields. Their chaotic yet loving way of life is upset when a landowner offers to buy their land. The pressure to sell divides the family and doubts begin to grow. When Amal’s cousin Rania visits from Cairo, she captivates Amal and her younger sisters with her modern lifestyle: jeans, TikTok videos, and lively city stories. Amal starts to question the life that seems to have been laid out for her and dreams of moving to Cairo. Now that the potential sale of the land offers the prospect of a future in the city, the family’s unshakable faith in their own life in the village starts to waver.

2026 Al Baraneya
2020 Birdland (short)

“Al Baraneya is the village where my family comes from. I remember my first visit very vividly. From the moment I set foot in the village, I was part of the community and was accepted into the family with the greatest of ease. Despite the fact that the family doesn’t have much and that they all live in sixty square meters, I was taken care of all day long. When feeding my baby, I was accompanied by all the women in the family. I thought of the Netherlands, where a week earlier I had been sitting alone in an uninspiring lactation room and realized that I have rarely felt so much part of a larger whole as I did at that moment in that room, with all those women around me and my child at my breast. I was part of a tradition, of generations that came before me and would come after me, and I was overcome by the feeling that this really had to be how it was meant to be. Al Baraneya is a plea for small living and an indictment of capitalism, told through the daily lives of a close-knit, hard-working family. A story about what it means to grow up as a young woman in a place where opportunities are getting smaller and smaller, while the family and the world are getting bigger. Because even though life as a woman – especially in a place like this village – is not always easy, they manage to keep each other alive through everything.” (Ashgan El-Hamus)

Ashgan El-Hamus portrays small human dramas in a grand way on the screen. During her studies at the Netherlands Film Academy, she wrote the short films Beerenburgh and Flynn. In 2017, she graduated with the thesis film Aimée. Afterwards, she worked on the NPO series Skam NL. In 2020, the short film Birdland, written and directed by El-Hamus, won the Grand Prix de la Ville Brest at the Brest Film Festival. She also wrote and directed an episode (Lois Lane) of the TV series Onze Straat. Al Baraneya is her first feature film.