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عيش و ملح - Documentary (2024)
Project type
Documentary
Date
2019 - 2024
Location
Egypt
My Bachelor project, supervised by Maria Mohr
“Eish w Malh: Egyptian Cuisine and Culture” is a passion project of mine that I started back in 2019, and finally completed it by June 2024. It is a documentary exploring Egyptian culture through the cuisine. “Eish w Malh” means “Bread and Salt” and it is an Egyptian saying to welcome guests, because eating together is a metaphor for love and friendship between people.
Egyptian cuisine is an integral part of the Egyptian culture. Our food is related to history, stories, feasts, celebrations, and certain cities, thus it’s embedded in our culture. The cuisine itself is very diverse and unique since it has been influenced throughout history, dating back to ancient Egyptians, and developing through colonizations and immigrations, thus becoming this new traditional Egyptian Cuisine that we have now.
The purpose of this project was to document the (folkloric) origin food stories that have not been documented properly, as well as to market the Egyptian cuisine as a cuisine of its own -- because it is often seen as just a part of the Middle Eastern or Mediterranean cuisine.
On a more personal level, this project has been a way for me to connect with Egyptian culture. For years, people used to tell me “you’re not Egyptian enough” and it’s definitely because of Western influences resulting from my education and my consumption of Western media. I had always felt trapped somewhere between being an Egyptian and "kind of" Western. However, working on this project allowed me to explore different sides of Egypt and to have a better understanding of the culture. Since then, I have noticed that this identity crisis is actually quite common among Egyptian youth, so my goal is to inspire other Egyptian to connect with the culture through this project.