A nice series has been on Netflix for a while but I only watched it a few days ago. The series is simple and nice. The actors’ performance is great and convincing, the directing is distinct, and the filming locations are beautiful in my beloved Alexandria. And best of all it shows Alexandria in two eras – during the 1919 revolution and in our current time.
But the idea of the series is nice despite its simplicity. It tells the story of a young man who lives in a room in a palace garden, Haresh Qadaei Ali, then we discover that he is one of the heirs of the palace, and that he is trying to preserve it, and the history of his family that the palace represents.
He meets a beautiful journalist at the door of the palace, who is trying to do an investigation about the palace after receiving information that some businessmen want to demolish the palace and build towers in its place. So he starts recounting stories about the palace so that she can publish an investigative report that might help him protect his family’s palace and hand it over to the state on the condition that it be made into an arts palace that he oversees.
The events move through time and space and take us from Alexandria to Upper Egypt and nice stories between past and present, real and fictional characters. Perhaps this is a game that writer Abdel-Rahim Kamal excels at, mixed with a spirit of mystery, suspense and reality mixed with myth.
The series deals with issues of love, religion, art, authenticity versus fakery, confused people between history, art and culture; interests, money and power; their lost dreams; and their simple ambitions and dreams that clash with the tyranny of materialism and the requirements of life.
The best thing about the series is that it is away from famous well-known characters, yet at the same time they have a presence as witnesses to the era, but their presence is woven into the details of the story, as if they are shadows or backgrounds to a picture, or a fleeting detail in the book of the infatuated English chronicler with Alexandria and its people, so he lived in the place he loved, married from them and wrote about them.
He wrote about pashas, bullies, servants, artists, religious men, businessmen, united by one characteristic: they are ordinary people resembling those we meet everyday on the street. None of them is a hero or extraordinary person, yet each of them has a story worth telling.
A story full of many details and dreams that don’t come true, and those who have the power to make the dream come true, but the dream eludes them and a part slips between their hands, or comes true when it’s too late, and everyone keeps chasing the missing part, neither fully surrendering nor fully winning, while everyone waits to see what the days will bring.
Arabic