✨ “El Baranya” Takes an Egyptian Story to an International Audience
From a small Egyptian village to major international film festivals, “El Baranya” is expanding the global journey of Egyptian-Dutch filmmaker Ashjan Alhoms.
The film marks Alhoms’ first feature-length narrative project and follows its world premiere at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival with a new international stop in North America.
🎥 The film is scheduled to screen at the Chicago International Film Festival from October 14 to 25, 2026, where it will compete in the festival’s New Directors Competition.
The Chicago selection represents an important step for Alhoms’ feature debut, particularly because the film combines a distinctly Egyptian setting with themes that can resonate across cultures.
Rather than relying on conventional melodrama, “El Baranya” builds its drama through family relationships, everyday details, silence, landscape and the quiet pressure surrounding personal choices.
🌾 Amal Between Family Roots and a Different Future
At the heart of the film is Amal, a pregnant woman living with her family in an Egyptian village.
Her familiar routine is disrupted when the family receives an offer to sell their land.
🌱 The land is not simply a financial asset. It represents family history, memory, belonging and the continuity of generations.
Once the possibility of selling it emerges, tensions begin to surface within the family.
Amal is caught in the middle of these uncertainties while confronting a deeply personal question: should she remain within the life she has always known, or should she consider the possibility of building a different future?
The city becomes an image of possibility — a place associated with greater opportunities and personal freedom, but also with uncertainty.
✨ The film does not provide an easy answer. Instead, it allows the characters to navigate the emotional cost of change and the complicated relationship between security and independence.
👩👩👧 Women, Family and Generational Change
One of the central elements of “El Baranya” is its exploration of family relationships.
The conflict is not presented as a simple battle between opposing sides. Instead, the film examines how love, fear, financial concerns, tradition and hopes for the future can exist within the same family.
Amal’s pregnancy adds another emotional dimension to her decisions.
🤰 She is not only thinking about her own future but also about the life awaiting the child she is carrying.
Through Amal, the film explores questions of personal independence, women’s choices, family expectations, social pressure and generational differences.
The countryside is not portrayed as entirely restrictive, just as the city is not presented as a magical solution.
🏡 Rural life offers intimacy, community and a powerful sense of belonging, while also presenting limited opportunities and social expectations.
🌆 The city may offer new possibilities, but those possibilities come with their own uncertainties.
❤️ A Personal Project Rooted in Ashjan Alhoms’ Egyptian Heritage
For Ashjan Alhoms, “El Baranya” is a deeply personal project.
The idea was inspired in part by her return to her family’s village in Egypt’s Menoufia Governorate, where she encountered a strong sense of community and observed the relationships between different generations, particularly among the women in her family.
Those experiences became part of the film’s emotional foundation.
🌿 Family memories, the connection to place and the differences between generations were transformed into elements of the story.
Although “El Baranya” is not a direct autobiography, its world is clearly connected to Alhoms’ personal relationship with Egypt and her family heritage.
🎭 Reem Amer and the Real Family Cast
One of the film’s most distinctive creative decisions was Alhoms’ choice to cast members of her real Egyptian family alongside professional actress Reem Amer.
Amer is the film’s central professional performer, playing Amal and providing the dramatic anchor for the story.
🎬 The presence of non-professional family members gives the film an unusually natural atmosphere, allowing genuine relationships and spontaneous interactions to become part of its cinematic texture.
The cast also underwent months of rehearsals and preparation.
The process was designed to create performances that felt natural rather than traditionally theatrical.
The result is a hybrid cinematic approach that combines the emotional structure of fiction with an observational quality often associated with documentary filmmaking.
🎥 Creating the Visual World of Rural Egypt
Visually, “El Baranya” avoids presenting the Egyptian countryside as a postcard or a familiar cinematic stereotype.
Director of photography Doowy Hinneck NSC creates a carefully controlled visual language, using camera movement to capture both the vastness of the rural landscape and the confinement of domestic interiors.
📸 This contrast becomes part of the storytelling.
The countryside may look physically open, yet characters can feel emotionally confined by social expectations and limited opportunities.
Inside the family homes, the sense of restricted space becomes stronger, reflecting the psychological pressure experienced by the characters.
Sound designer Taco Drijfhout builds an atmospheric soundscape around the rural environment, while editor Dieter Diependaele balances the film’s restrained pace with its gradually increasing psychological tension.
🎵 Laura Bell contributes to the film’s musical dimension, completing the sensory world created by the filmmakers.
🌍 An International Production With Egyptian Roots
“El Baranya” is an international co-production involving the Netherlands, Egypt and Belgium.
The film is led by producer Frank Hoeve of Dutch production company BALDR Film, alongside co-producers Qismat El Sayed of Egypt’s Seera Films and Eurydice Gysel of Belgium’s CZAR Film.
The screenplay was written by Ashjan Alhoms and Roelof-Jan Minneboo.
The project received development and production support from several European and international institutions, including the Netherlands Film Fund, CoBO, the Belgian Tax Shelter, BNP Paribas Fortis Film Finance, Creative Europe MEDIA, the Red Sea Fund and KRO-NCRV.
🎞️ Worldwide sales are handled by MAD World.
The international production structure gives the film access to a wider festival network while maintaining its distinctly Egyptian cultural identity.
🎬 Ashjan Alhoms’ Path to Her First Feature
“El Baranya” marks a major new chapter in Ashjan Alhoms’ career.
The Egyptian-Dutch filmmaker studied at the Netherlands Film Academy, developing her voice through short filmmaking and screenwriting before moving toward feature-length storytelling.
She wrote several projects during her studies and graduated in 2017 with AIMÉE.
She later worked as a screenwriter on the Dutch television adaptation of SKAM NL, while continuing to develop her directing career.
🎥 Her transition into feature filmmaking retains the qualities associated with her previous work: an interest in intimate human relationships, restrained drama, everyday environments and characters dealing with social change.
⭐ From Venice to Chicago
After its world premiere in Venice, “El Baranya” is now preparing for another significant international milestone with its North American premiere in Chicago.
The festival screening gives the film an opportunity to reach a new audience while introducing Alhoms’ feature filmmaking voice to international cinema circles.
🇪🇬 At the same time, the film carries a very specific Egyptian story into a broader cinematic conversation.
Its central questions extend beyond geography: What does it mean to belong to a place? When does security become a limitation? Can someone choose a different future without losing the roots that shaped them?
✨ Between the countryside and the city, family and independence, land and aspiration, “El Baranya” builds an intimate story around the moment when a familiar life begins to chang
