Life After Siham

She is gone, and yet she refuses to disappear. Filmmaker Namir Abdel Messeeh turns to cinema to understand the absence of his mother and the traces she leaves behind. Constructed from hours of film reels shot of her over the years, mirrored by new digital footage of his father and family after her passing, the film unfolds as a non-linear journey through memory, grief, and storytelling. As Namir films his grieving father, revisits her grave, and uncovers forgotten letters and photographs, he traces a life shaped by migration, faith, and inheritance between Egypt and France. Interlacing this material with excerpts from Youssef Chahine’s cinema, fiction and autobiography blur, creating an interplay between life and death, preservation and invention. Through self-reflexive narration, Namir reconstructs her life as cinematic fragments that transform memory into storytelling. In doing so, Life After Siham reflects on cinema itself—on how images hold what is gone, and how filming life is also a way of reinventing it.