Out on the Street

During an acting workshop, ten Egyptian workers distill their experiences of injustice and exploitation at the hands of bosses, police, and the court system into a series of vignettes. The resulting film integrates workshop exercises and reenactments, with the men shifting between roles and stories, and with various factory spaces marked out on the floor of the rooftop “studio.” The filmmakers noted, “We don’t want to make a film that turns [the workers’] harsh reality into a spectacle . . . but a re-evaluation of the past and an imagining of what the future could hold.” “By complicating the documentary approach, the filmmakers have created a work . . . that finds itself amid a wider constellation of ideas about labor, social justice, and the circulation of images” (Museum of Modern Art).