Welcome to 25 for 25 my project to watch and eat my way around the world in 2025 with 25 movies from 25 countries matched with 25 country themed dinners. Today’s entry is Egypt but you can see the full Masterlist to watch and cook along with me.
Country: Egypt
Movie: ڤوي! ڤوي! ڤوي! [Voy! Voy! Voy!]
Director: Omar Hilal
Year: 2023
The Elevator Pitch: Based on a true story, Hassan is an underpaid guard who is languishing in his life in Egypt and dreams of moving to Europe and starting a new life. However when legal immigration is shut out to him and being smuggled seems too harrowing, Hassan finds a third way. A local blind football team will hold its final in Poland where he can escape and make his European dreams come true and there’s only small one problem – Hassan is not blind. Hassan, of course, decides to do the unthinkable and fake it. A series of complications immediately ensue.
A satire about immigration, what people will do for a better life, and a con artist trying not to get caught.
How Was the Movie?: My husband and I both really enjoyed this film. The main theme and focus of the film is on immigration but I also found it really interesting from a disability perspective also. I wasn’t aware of blind football (I only know blind American folks, football isn’t quite as popular among them) so this sent me down a rabbit hole after the movie to learn all about it (the movie does a good cursory overview so don’t worry about going in blind. /I am pelted with tomatoes until I die for this pun)
This movie plays out like a crime film or a heist and sometimes reaches an absurd fever pitch (think 6 split screens at once a la modern Ocean’s 11) but I generally really enjoyed that. The handful of main characters are the right blend of sympathetic and absolute bastards and the side characters are all extremely delightful and memorable especially Hassan’s mother. There are several twists that happen during the film so it’s actually hard to review the film without spoiling any of them but mostly the film takes a fairly serious subject matter and manages to make you laugh about it.
I didn’t have much cultural friction either. The translations were really solid and I think I understood the perspectives and material enough not to ever feel like I didn’t understand the motives despite having pretty little experience with Egyptian film and culture. It’s also just very funny. In a way that transcends language.
The main actor is fantastic and I really loved the man who plays the Captain of the football team as well.
The one downside is that because it’s a film being produced in Egypt it never gets into any of the characters particular reasons for wanting to leave Egypt but that’s the most minor of issues. It takes plenty of pot shots at other cultural and social issues surrounding Europe, porn, disability, and relationships.
I would absolutely recommend this film to anyone, you will probably have a great time and the fact that this is a real life story (more or less, it’s time shifted likely to avoid governmental implications/complications) makes it even more wild and interesting.
What was for Dinner?:
For dinner I made koshary and basbousa.
Koshary [كشرى] is a very common Egyptian street food that my husband has wanted to try for years and we got to do our own Leo pointing meme because at one point in the film, while we were eating our koshary, the characters went to a truck and ate some themselves. The thing is that it’s very easy to make each part of koshary but like many street foods, there’s a lot of components making the overall production a bizzare, overlong nightmare. By the the time I got to boiling the pasta, I think I’d been cooking for 3 hours and I literally put my head down and cried on the counter for a few minutes. Regardless of all that, it was absolutely delicious! How terrible! I might have to make it again!
Basbousa [بسبوس] is a semolina cake that is soaked through with sugar syrup. I’ve eaten and made pretty similar things before and always liked them but I have to confess this time I did not make the cake with semolina because I forgot to buy some and didn’t want to return to the store so I used kama so it was more like an Estonian-Egyptian fusion cake. It was a little crumbly but still great. Easy to make and great with tea or coffee.
That’s it for Egypt, see you next in Australia!