Abu Bakr Shawky on Mining His Family History for ‘The Stories’

Egyptian-Austrian director Abu Bakr Shawky drew from his family’s personal history to make “The Stories,” which spans between the late 60s and 80s, and depicts life in his native country during that period from the cross-cultural prism that has formed his vision as an artist.

After making a splash with his first feature, “Yomeddine” – which had the rare distinction of making the competition cut for Cannes – Shawky followed up with Saudi-set travel movie “Hajjan,” which premiered at Saudi’s Red Sea Film Festival in 2023. He is now back in Jeddah with “The Stories,” in the Red Sea competition.

The film takes its cue from the fact that when his father, who is named Ahmed, was an aspiring pianist in Cairo in 1967 he became pen-pals with a young Austrian woman named Liz, who is now Shawky’s mother. 

“The Stories,” which is written and directed by Shawky, is toplined by British-Egyptian actor Amir El-Masry (“The Crown”), Austria’s Valerie Pachner (“Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore”) and Egyptian star Nelly Karim (“Voy! Voy! Voy!”). The film is produced by Julie Viez, Mohamed Hefzy, Alexander Glehr, Johanna Scherz, Shahinaz El Akkad and Ahmed Badawy.

Shawky speaks to Variety about mining his family’s storytelling talent and why soccer is such an important element of their family lore.

How did ‘The Stories’ originate?

It all started with me wanting to do kind of a small film about how my parents met in the 70s. My mother is from Austria, my father is from Egypt, and they were pen pals. They started writing letters to each other, which was a common method of communication back then. That’s how they met.

Then, as the writing moved along, it turned into something bigger and bigger. It started turning into a film about a fictionalized version of the stories of my family. We would always get together once a week and talk about all the stories that would happen to us. I noticed that I have a family of great storytellers. They’re all very gifted. When they would tell a story – the same story, over and over again – it would become bigger and bigger. It would become more of a legend, than an actual story. And the actual realism of the story, or the reality of where it came from, got lost. This film kind of became the same thing. It started as something that was supposed to be based on real story. But then it became more and more fictional. In the end, the film just became a kind of an amalgam of all these legends that I was told.

Another element of this film, aside from the cross-cultural love theme, is history. Through the decades you get a prism through, which you see different sides of the history of Egypt. For people who are not from Egypt it’s a great primer. Talk to me about that aspect. How did you weave it into the narrative?

I mean, there are two things. First of all, I think that was quite a vital period during which Egypt was headed into its modern history, and the switch and change of allegiances between the Soviet allegiance and the Western allegiance. Wartime versus peace time. That had a very big impact. But in the film politics are only in the background. It’s really about the people trying to navigate through these difficult times and what impact it has on them. It’s about what impact do these wars, these big events, these uprisings, have on the little man who is apolitical. Who doesn’t want to participate in any of this. Who just wants to live. They just want to do their thing, but it just never works out because something bigger happens to them. And there’s constantly kind of a dichotomy. Whenever something good happens to the country, something bad happens to the family, and vice versa.

Then there is your family’s obsession with Egypt’s Zamalek SC soccer club. We get great archive footage of their matches. Talk to me about weaving in that thread.

I’ve always thought about this team as being very cinematic because – even though I obviously took a lot of liberties in portraying this and amplifying it a bit – with Zamalek there’s always an element of playing against the odds. They’re always one man down, or something. Like they are almost playing against themselves and have lots of big challenges ahead and they never give up. It’s very similar to what the family is going through. Almost like a reflection of what they are.