Organized with ArteEast, we’re thrilled to be screening Tamer El Said’s In The Last Days of The City which was  was called an “ode to the fleetingness of urban landscapes and of memory” in the New York Times. 

Tamer El Said will be here in attendance for a conversation following the film with contributing editor for BIdoun,  Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, who called the film “majestic … a fearless elegy to the Egyptian capital, to artistic heritage in the Arab world, to passionate politics and to hope itself” this year in Artforum.

Doors open at 7PM.

Tamer El Said’s ambitious debut feature tells the fictional story of a filmmaker from downtown Cairo played by Khalid Abdalla (The Kite Runner, United 93, Green Zone, The Square) as he struggles to capture the soul of a city on edge while facing loss in his own life. Shot in Cairo, Beirut, Baghdad and Berlin during the two years before the outbreak of revolution in Egypt, the film’s multi-layered stories are a visually rich exploration of friendship, loneliness and life in cities shaped by the shadows of war and adversity.

Tamer El Said is a filmmaker living between Berlin and Cairo where he was born in 1972. He studied filmmaking and journalism and went on to make many documentaries and short films that received several international and local awards. He was also teaching at the High Cinema Institute in Cairo between 1999 and 2003. In 2002, he took on the role of Senior Producer and Artistic Consultant for Nile Productions, moving across to Hot Spot Films in Dubai in 2003. His time as Senior Producer at Hot Spot saw the company expanded dramatically, producing 250 documentaries in 58 countries, and winning several international awards. Tamer founded Zero Production in 2007 to produce independent films. He is also a founder of Cimatheque – Alternative Film Centre in Egypt, a multipurpose space that provides facilities, training and programing for the independent filmmaking community. El Said has also run mentoring workshops in many international film and art spaces including, among others, the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London, the School of the Art Institute in Chicago (SAIC) and Silent Green in Berlin.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a contributing editor for Bidoun who writes regularly for Artforum, Bookforum, and Frieze. She has traveled extensively in the Middle East and North Africa to report on the relationship between contemporary art and political upheaval, writing for newspapers, magazines, and journals including Afterall, Aperture, and The New York Times, among others. In 2007, she was a fellow in the USC Annenberg Getty Arts Journalism Program. She won a grant from the Creative Capital Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Program in 2013. Her first book, on the paintings of Etel Adnan, was just published by Lund Humphries. She is currently working on a second book, on art and political violence, for Columbia Global Reports.