The El Gouna Film Festival honored actress Mona Zaki with its Creative Achievement Award. During the discussion that followed the tribute, Zaki spoke about roles that have been described as daring. Among those mentioned were Heba in Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story and Mai in Perfect Strangers, two characters that caused an uproar when the films were released. But there is another character who, I believe, was the first crack in the wall of so-called “clean cinema,” under whose umbrella Zaki had worked for a time: Alia in An El Eshq Wel Hawa (Of Love and Passion).
Released in 2006, An El Eshq Wel Hawa starred Ahmed El Sakka, Mona Zaki, Menna Shalaby, Ghada Abdel Razek, Tarek Lotfy, and Bushra. At first glance, it looks like a romantic drama about love and separation. The male lead abruptly abandons Alia after learning that her sister works at a nightclub. He marries and becomes a father, but later meets another woman, to whom he is drawn and with whom he becomes emotionally entangled. Alia, meanwhile, becomes part of his past, yet he remains the first and most important love of her life, despite the upheavals she goes through.
That is how the story appears on the surface, as written by Tamer Habib and directed by Kamla Abu Zekry. Beneath its romantic plot, however, lie other layers of interpretation and important meanings that relate to women characters in Egyptian cinema.
We all know Hanadi and the famous line from Doaa Al Karawan (The Nightingale’s Prayer): “Where is Hanadi, Mother? The plague took Hanadi.” Hanadi’s fate remained the inevitable ending for female characters deceived in the name of love or, more precisely, women who have had a sexual experience, whether consensual or otherwise. Hanadi (Zahrat El-Ola) was far from alone in this category. Other characters followed the same idea: that the heroine’s story must end in punishment.
A succession of female characters in Egyptian cinema met the same fate, with punishment taking different forms: murder, suicide, psychological devastation, social isolation. The stories varied, but the logic governing their endings remained similar: a woman who crosses the boundaries of what is permitted, or whose boundaries are violated, must pay a price of some kind.
It is as if cinema, in many of its examples, did more than portray society’s cruelty toward women. It reproduced society’s judgments within the dramatic structure itself, making tragedy appear the natural consequence of what had happened, rather than questioning the system that turns women’s bodies into sites of honor and shame and holds them alone responsible for what they endure.
The examples are many. In Ana Wa Banati (My Daughters and I), a young woman dies after a period of homelessness and drifting, while the man responsible carries on enjoying his life. In Al-Thalatha Yohebounaha (The Three Love Her), the heroine stands in the shadows behind a tree, dressed in black, watching from a distance as the man she loves marries her close friend. After her manager assaulted her at work, she concluded that she no longer deserved life or love. She fabricates a situation to drive her lover away, convinced that, after what happened, she is no longer worthy of him.
In Al-Hayah Montaha Al-Lazza (Life Is the Ultimate Pleasure), a young woman who falls in love with a married man and has an intimate relationship with him is left in tears. The husband, meanwhile, regrets what he has done and returns to his wife, who forgives him. In the film’s final scene, the couple dances together, while the young woman’s fate remains unknown.
But what had actually happened? Nothing more than that she lost a few drops of blood on a bed.
These details lead us back to how filmmakers, whether directors or screenwriters, viewed such an incident in different periods. The concept of sexual assault was not present to begin with, nor was any engagement with the idea of a woman’s, or any individual’s, freedom to choose how to live.
In The Language of Cinema, Marcel Martin argues that every film image, whether situated in the present, the past, or a possible future, is ultimately the product of a personal judgment, expressed through cinematic techniques whose meanings we learn to interpret.
When we examine the meanings conveyed by certain scenes involving women in film, such as the moment the male protagonist crushes a rose underfoot while carrying the heroine to the bedroom in Ana Wa Banati, or the heroine’s walk into darkness at the end of The Three Love Her, the message is clear: the heroine is condemned, and her future is symbolically crushed alongside the sexual encounter. In the collective imagination, this becomes her inevitable fate, turning such portrayals into a recurring cinematic stereotype.
According to Jörg Schweinitz in Film and Stereotype: A Challenge for Cinema and Theory, stereotyping involves three elements: the reduction of complexity, stability, and the development of a familiar convention. In the pattern examined here, a woman makes a mistake or loses her virginity, and her dramatic fate is subsequently determined by that classification.
From here, the pattern becomes a cultural meaning that travels from society, through the minds of filmmakers, onto the screen. As Stuart Hall explains in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, stereotyping “reduces, essentializes, naturalizes and fixes ‘difference.’”
From here, too, Alia, the character Mona Zaki played in An El Eshq Wel Hawa (Of Love and Passion), appears as a powerful leap over stereotype. She is far more complex than the film’s romantic storyline suggests, because she exposes the contradictions governing the representation of women, their desires, and their sexual experiences, as well as the limits a heroine is allowed to cross before her dramatic trial begins. Behind the romantic construction of the character lie other questions about how women are represented, how sexual experience becomes a yardstick for judging them, and the gap between what a man is permitted to do and the consequences imposed on a woman.
If Hanadi paid for her experience with her life, the question this kind of story raises goes beyond the heroine’s fate. It concerns the logic that makes punishment look deserved or inevitable. How does a sexual experience become a final verdict on a woman’s worth, while a man is not judged by the same standards?
And how do these verdicts seep into films through symbols, fates, and closing scenes, until they seem a natural part of the story rather than a reflection of a patriarchal cultural system?
These questions are what make a return to Alia worthwhile. Behind the story of love and separation, one can read the image of a woman who falls into shock after her first love and then enters an unresolved emotional relationship with a man who is entirely distant from her, intellectually and psychologically. She suffers a profound breakdown. Director Kamla Abu Zekry conveys that collapse in a particularly harsh dramatic moment: as viewers, we watch Alia break down in the middle of a room, seen from above in a wide shot that makes her look small and frightened.
But the breakdown is not the end. Alia carries on, and she learns from her sister Fatma (Ghada Abdel Razek), who also finds a man who values her and decides to build his life with her despite her work, which society stigmatizes. This helps Alia regain some of her strength and realize that she is not the one with the problem; the problem lies with the other party, who walked away, and one experience is not the end.
Tracing Alia’s gaze (Mona Zaki) through each phase reveals a precise record of her changes: the exhilarated look of a woman in love beside her beloved, Omar (Ahmed El Sakka), at the start; then the look of a woman broken after her relationship with Ashraf (Magdy Kamel); then deep sorrow as she tries to move on; and finally strength and defiance in the last phase, when she becomes a famous singer and posters for her album fill the streets.
This transformation can be read as a break from the logic of stories that tie a woman’s fate to her sexual experience and make it the event that sums up her entire life. Alia does not reclaim her life because she returns to Omar, because someone acknowledges her worth, or because she marries Ashraf to heal what happened. She does so because she goes on living beyond the boundaries of relationships she once believed were everything.
That is where the character’s importance lies. Alia does not escape pain so much as learn not to make it her final definition of herself, and she refuses to let a failed romantic experience become a lasting verdict on whether she deserves love or life.
Her ability to carry on seems to bear the trace of loss rather than erase it. Alia’s moving past it, then, does not necessarily represent a complete victory over the social norms that put women on trial. Instead, it points to a space for resistance in a world where romantic relationships remain governed by a clear imbalance in how responsibility and freedom are distributed.
Fatma’s character gains added significance within this dramatic context. Her story runs parallel to Alia’s, challenging the assumption that the stigma attached to women who work in nightclubs necessarily rules out a relationship built on acceptance and esteem. While Omar abandons Alia, Fatma meets a man who accepts her work and her past, and who does not let society’s gaze become the only measure by which he judges her. Fatma is therefore more than a supporting character. Her story offers another possible fate for a woman who crosses the moral boundaries society draws: not necessarily punishment or isolation, but the possibility of building a relationship that does not require her to disown her past in order to deserve love.
Rewatching certain scenes featuring Alia, Hanadi, and Iman, I realized that the difference between these women lies not simply in the fact that one goes on living while another dies or withdraws from the world, but in the way meaning is constructed around the experience each of them has been through. In Doaa Al Karawan (The Nightingale’s Prayer), Hanadi is the victim of a crime committed by a man, yet she is the one made to bear the shame, and the crime becomes the cause of her life’s collapse. Alia, by contrast, is not reduced by the narrative to a single experience, nor does her story end at the moment she breaks down. Between the two characters lies the distance between two ways of telling women’s stories: one that makes a woman a prisoner of what happened to her, and another that grants her, at least in part, the ability to go on living and reshape the image she holds of herself.
Perhaps this is why Alia deserves a closer look today, and a return to the character with appreciation, particularly as Mona Zaki is being honored for her career. Doing so allows us to move beyond the familiar question of how daring the performance was or how much controversy the character stirred when the film was released. The more important question is what space the character opened up for women on screen, without reducing a woman to a sexual experience or turning her body into a record of society’s judgments.
