Omar 2000

When Omar finds his first grey hairs a month before his thirtieth birthday, he decides to change his mediocre life radically: he will emigrate to America. But first he wants to settle up with those who have got in his way in life. As his revenge actions progress, Omar loses his sense of reality. His friend, the funeral firector, takes him on a magical journey to the city of the dead. There Omar collects a mottley crew of supporters around him and starts his battle against society with them at hisside.Ahmed Atef made a dramatic and bizarre film about changing values in Egyptian society. By Egyptian standards, the film includes pretty daring scenes: jokes about Viagra and references to the US Embassy that meddles with religious sentiments in Egypt. In other fields, Atef remains faithful to Arab tradition: the way in which apparently unrelated scenes form the narrative refers to classic tales such as A Thousand and One Nights. In his exuberant use of colour, Atef allowed himself to be inspired by paintings by Kandinsky, Matisse and Keith Haring: the lighting of each scene is based on the colour palette of a specific work. At the international film festival of Alexandria, Omar 2000 won no less than nine awards and is the first Egyptian film to name a casting director in the titles: Abdel-Hadi, the first professional casting bureau in Egypt.