Perfumed with Mint is a surrealist tale of a listless and disillusioned Egypt

Emmy-winning cinematographer Muhammad Hamdy makes his directorial debut with this feature, replete with magic realism

Perfumed With Mint by Muhammed Hamdy has been nominated for the Golden Star at the Marrakech International Film Festival. Photo: Reason8

In his first feature film, Egyptian director Muhammad Hamdy presents a surrealist portrait of his country steeped in social and political disillusionment.

Perfumed with Mint follows Bahaa, a doctor hounded by the wraith-like shadows of his past. He is pursued from one abandoned house to another, along with his friend Mahdy, a man afflicted by a condition, which causes mint leaves to sprout from his body. Their surreal journey introduces them to a cast of enigmatic characters, including a grieving mother pursued by her son’s ghost and a drug dealer whose illicit substances may hold the key to curing Mahdy’s affliction.

The political undertone of the film is deftly communicated, as the characters recount their memories in prison and voice their discontent at the status-quo. Bahaa, for instance, carries with him a letter that represents a fleeting moment of affection. Yet, the letter, soaked during his imprisonment, remains perpetually damp, perhaps a nod to his unfulfilled longing.

These elements of magic realism are replete throughout the film, and offer stirring symbolisms that shed light on contemporary Egyptian reality. Hamdy says he was greatly inspired by ancient Arabic literature, namely Ibn al-Muqaffa’s Kalila wa Dimna.

“When you track his life, you find that he lived in a political turmoil that’s not very different to the time we live in now,” Hamdy says, speaking to The National on the sidelines of the Marrakech International Film Festival, where the film is being shown.

“When Ibn al-Muqaffa wrote Kalila wa Dimna, he saw a need for the animals to talk. He was trying to play with the political reality of his time, which he was not allowed to talk about. So he needed imagination. He needed mythology.”

It is by following this line of thought that Hamdy leapt to a fantastical realm of his own, a maze of memories that come and go as shadows and flickers of light.

“Mythology is the art of the defeated,” Hamdy says. “For me, I felt that was exactly my position. I present what is defeated. It's not just that I am defeated, everything that I believe in is defeated in the world I live in, in Egypt. Everything that I wish for, everything that I believed in, all my friends, have been defeated. They are people that made history and that same history turned around and kicked them out of it.”

This is the limbo that Hamdy is striving to depict in Perfumed with Mint, a place of deafening silence and anxious stillness. A demanding yet rewarding cinematic journey, the film forgoes a high-octane plot in favour of exploring Egypt's politically inert landscape.

“I don't think there is any political life in my country at all,” he says. “I felt from the beginning that we live in a system that's really trying to punish memory. There is a war on memory and that's where the whole idea of the film came from.”

As difficult as it is to watch, the film is also mesmerising with its tasteful framed scenes giving charge to its listless pace. A large part of the tableauxesque framing – a cinematic technique that involves composing a scene like a still painting – comes as “an indirect result” from Hardy’s experience as a cinematographer. Yet, he says he never felt happy with his work in that position and believed he had more to communicate. In 2019, he began working on a script for Perfumed with Mint, taking his time honing it while seeking funding.

“It took a lot of time to finance the film. So it gave me the opportunity to rewrite,” he says. Nevertheless, he never intended for the script to become a rule book, and committed to instead letting the film and its narrative bloom naturally when filming finally began.

The film stars Mahdy Abo Bahat, Abdo Zin Eldin, Alaa El Din Hamada and Hatem Emam Moustafa, and for many of them, is their debut work. “I would have never been able to do the film without them, because it's a very collaborative thing,” he says. “We're a very small group. I've known these guys for a very long time. It's never been a relationship of actor and director. We’re friends.”

Perfumed with Mint has made significant headway in the festival circuit. At the Venice Film Festival, it was nominated for the Critics’ Week Award for Best Film. It has also been nominated for the Golden Star at the Marrakech Film Festival.

Yet, the feedback has been polarised, Hamdy says. “Some people find it extremely boring, and some find it extremely impressive. And I think it's nice to have a film that gives me that much clarity. People hate it or love it, and I like that.”