STATEMENT

I wanted to make this film… because her name was Sahar. She was the only other kid my age in my grandmother’s house in Cairo, where I’d spend my summers far away from New York. I could barely speak Arabic, and she, no English, but that never got in the way of our endless misadventures.

That she served my grandmother was a peculiar observation I never made much of as a child. Even worse, everyone dealt with her presence as if there was nothing unusual. If anything, my grandmother was praised for taking her in and sparing her a worse reality of harsh labor and God knows what… But the closer I got to Sahar, the more I could sense the big feelings hiding inside her little body that no one seemed to notice; her complicated sense of identity hanging in limbo between two very different and unforgiving worlds. Sahar greatly inspired this story and the development of TOHA’s character.

The term “child maid” should make one shudder, evoking visceral discomfort and outrage. Children like Toha exist within an unyielding social hierarchy-a structure that offers scarce opportunities for mobility while fostering a stark interdependence and tension between upper and lower classes. This fraught dynamic becomes the stage upon which Toha’s story unfolds. The film delves into the complexities of her emotions as she relentlessly pursues a fantastical yet deeply relatable wish.

Child labor is illegal and punishable by law in Egypt. According to UNICEF, over 160 million children WORLDWIDE are engaged in child labor. That number does not reflect the many Tohas who often slip between cracks under the false pretense of goodwill, cloaked in classism.