Toha, an eight-year-old girl who works as a maid for a wealthy family in Cairo, forms a special bond with Nelly, the family’s daughter. She has never celebrated her own birthday, and so she sets out to organise Nelly’s perfectly, secretly hoping to finally taste that joy herself. As her relationship with Laila, Nelly’s mother, crosses the usual boundaries between employer and servant, social hierarchies begin to crack, and Toha is forced to confront the harsh reality of class division in contemporary Egypt.
Selected to represent her country at the Academy Awards, in Happy Birthday we witness a harsh reality told through the pure and unbiased gaze of Toha, a girl who acts as an invisible hinge between two worlds that coexist in Cairo, yet seem alien to one another. Bunker-like neighbourhoods protected by armed guards and poor districts where sending children to work in wealthy homes can be a means of survival.
Toha, like the characters in Sean Baker’s Florida Project, is the innocent gaze of a child who simply wants to share her friend’s wish to celebrate her birthday. But within that innocence, she will lose all her rights as a child along the way. A film that does not renounce light in order to expose the darkness of a country devastated by class struggle.
Spanish Premiere
Tribeca Festival (Best International Film / Best International Screenplay)
