For El-Hamus, however, the film is less interested in choosing between tradition and modernity than in the intimate tensions that exist between them. Inspired by her own experience of being embraced by the women of her Egyptian family, she captures a world where children are raised collectively, generations overlap, and female solidarity becomes its own kind of inheritance.
Through Amal’s doubts, desires and growing sense of responsibility, Al Baraneya asks what freedom really means when home is both a source of comfort and a boundary, and whether another life is necessarily a better one.
AM: Al Baraneya is deeply connected to your own family history. What memories or emotions from your first visit to the village became the starting point for the film?
Ashgan El-Hamus: It was the sense of collectiveness I felt on that first day. I couldn’t tell whose child belonged to whom, because everyone looked after everyone. I had my firstborn with me, and the whole family helped out. When it was time to feed him, all the women gathered in the room and sat with me. That closeness made me realize how much I miss that in our modern Western world. That was the moment I knew I wanted to portray a family living so closely together.
AM: The proposed sale of the family’s land represents financial opportunity, but also the possible loss of a home, a community and a way of life. What interested you most about the emotional and moral complexity of that decision?
Ashgan El-Hamus: I could understand both sides. This opportunity represents modern life entering the village, and everyone deals with that change differently. Within one family, I saw the generational gap: the kids want a life beyond the village, one they already see more of through their phones, while the older generation fears losing tradition.
AM: Amal is pregnant and preparing to bring a new generation into the world, while simultaneously questioning the future that has been chosen for her. How does her pregnancy shape her desire for independence and change?
Ashgan El-Hamus: Once you’re pregnant, there’s a constant sense of responsibility. It’s never just about you anymore, because you’re carrying another person. That can feel suffocating at times, and doubts and fears can easily creep in. It’s also final in a way: once she has a child in the village, she’ll most likely never leave, just like her mother and grandmother before her.
AM: Rania’s jeans, TikTok videos and stories of Cairo introduce another vision of womanhood to Amal and her sisters. Did you want her to embody genuine freedom, the seductive promise of modernity, or something more ambiguous?
Ashgan El-Hamus: Something more ambiguous. It’s Amal’s perspective, and hers alone, and of course from that angle it looks like genuine freedom. But by the end of the film, we see Amal arrive at a different feeling: no matter what, even though it’s not perfect, this is my life. It’s less about which path is right and more about the fact that everyone has their own. Rania’s path isn’t Amal’s, and vice versa.
AM: You recall being surrounded and supported by the women of your family while feeding your baby. How did that experience influence the way you portray female solidarity, care and the transmission of traditions across generations?
Ashgan El-Hamus: As women, I don’t think we’re ever really on our own. All the generations before me are part of what it means to me to be a woman: shared fears, shared anger, shared traditions, passed down. Life isn’t always as easy for us as it is for men, so we need each other more. In my family in Egypt, the women spend more time with each other than with their own husbands. In a way, it’s each other who keep them sane.
AM: As Al Baraneya meets an international audience at Giornate degli Autori in Venice, what assumptions about rural Egyptian women, and about what constitutes a rich or successful life, do you hope the film might challenge?
Ashgan El-Hamus: I hope it gives an international audience an honest glimpse into an authentic life, and a sense that we’re more alike than we look. With everything happening in the Middle East right now, it matters to me to keep telling small, authentic stories about daily life, because that’s ultimately what life is. As for rural Egyptian women, I wanted to move away from the familiar, darker narrative of women suffering under men and having choices made for them. I wanted to show their humor, their strength, their togetherness, and the fact that behind closed doors, they often have far more to say than people think.