“Being” Portrays Happiness Amidst COVID-19
By: Malika Bayoumy
@malikahosam
Photo Courtesy of Malak El Araby
AUC film senior Malak El Araby won the Ladima Foundation’s Short Film Competition for her film Being, which conveys the simplicity of life and how the hardest times can lead to unexpected achievements.
The Ladima Foundation aims at empowering women and rectifying the gender imbalances within the film industry. The competition’s theme was “African Women in The Time of COVID-19.”
Being revolves around happiness and the simple moments in life. The movie describes all the mixed emotions the audience felt during lockdown.
It made the audience revisit all the happy moments enjoyed pre-corona such as hanging out with friends, going to birthdays, weddings or even being stuck in traffic.
El Araby explained that during quarantine everyone was feeling down, including herself. She felt anxious and started questioning everything around her seeking some kind of relief.
“I noticed during lockdown that I took too many things in life for granted,” El Araby said.
El Araby took the time spent in quarantine to reflect on the positive outcomes brought by this new experience instead of letting it weigh her down.
“This is how I came up with the idea of doing my short movie Being. I decided that my movie would be something I could revisit and rewatch to remember how it felt during lockdown,” she stated.
As a way to unravel all the confusion going on in her mind during quarantine, El Araby wrote the script herself.
“You never know how much longer you have on this earth, so enjoy every bit of it. Do everything with love, forgive, be kind and always appreciate the little things,” a snippet from El Araby’s script said.
El Araby explained that due to the lockdown, she faced some major obstacles while producing Being, one of which was not being able to leave her home to shoot, but that was not something that stopped her.
She came up with the idea of using her own archived videos of friends, family and even herself. She played around with filters while editing so her video ended up looking like a dream or a memory that would trigger the audience’s happy moments while watching the film.
At some point during the endless days that all looked quite similar, El Araby discovered the film competition by coincidence. She was scrolling through her Instagram feed and came across a post by CairoScene, an online magazine, that had written about the Ladima Foundation’s Competition.
She believed that this competition was a great opportunity to show off her artistic film-making work, which she had started working on during lockdown.
The movie opens with a shot of El Araby’s hands playing freely outside the car window, letting the wind control her movements aiming to inspire the audience to reminisce about the little things they might be missing at the time of quarantine.
Some scenes were shot abroad, one of which showed El Araby riding a motorcycle, feeling the fresh air running through her hair, while other shots were of beaches, animals and sunsets.
“I wanted it to be relatable to everyone around the world, so I started asking all the people around me what they miss the most,” El Araby told The Caravan.
She used scenes of human connection, airplanes, happy moments, birthday parties, concerts and traffic jams to strengthen the idea of how the audience can relate to possible happy moments they’re missing out on during quarantine.
The two-minute short movie starts with the word “Life” accompanied by the sound of the wind and peaceful instrumental music playing in the background. The ambience El Araby set up at the beginning of her film allowed the viewer to feel a sense of serenity and positivity as they read the captions.
This is not the only short movie that El Araby won an award for, Through Your Lens, another short movie produced by El Araby about women’s empowerment, won an award in the South Korean Urban International Film Festival back in 2017.
“I like to story-tell about cultures and people through my own camera lens,” El Araby said.
