YASSER SHAFIEY
BIO
Yasser Shafiey is an Egyptian filmmaker who began his creative career as a jewelry designer after graduating from the Faculty of Applied Arts in 2006. His passion for cinema led him to study at the Academy of Arts and the Jesuit Cinema School in Cairo. He has written and directed three award-winning short fiction films, all selected at international film festivals: The Dream of a Scene (2014), Intense Practice to Improve Performance (2018), and The Man Who Swallowed the Radio (2020). His 2018 Intense Practice to Improve Performance premiered at the Cairo International Film festival and went on to win several awards globally, including the Cervantes Award at the MedFilm Festival in Rome and Best Comedy at the Rome Independent Film Festival. Complaint no. 713317 marks his first feature-length film. The film premieres in Spain in AFRIKALDIA 2026.
FILMOGRAPHY
Complaint No. 713317 (2025). Feature film (81’).
The Man Who Swallowed the Radio (2020). Short fiction film (15’).
Intense Practice to Improve Performance (2018). Short fiction film (18´).
Helm Ek Mash-had (Dream of a Scene, 2014). Short fiction film (23´).
STATEMENT
It starts with a broken fridge. A middle-class couple in their 60s, living a quiet life, are simply trying to get it fixed. What seems like a straightforward task quickly unravels into something else entirely. Phone calls, delays, empty promises, silence. What we think is a journey to repair an appliance becomes something far more painful – a fight to hold on to their dignity in a system that keeps stripping it away.
At its core, this film is about “Al Qahr”- a word with no real translation in English or any other language. Not quite injustice. Not just oppression. It’s something deeper and heavier, something we know intimately in this part of the world. Al Qahr is the emotional, psychological, and social weight of being denied your most basic rights – quietly, daily, endlessly – until it becomes a way of life. It is when nothing works, and no one listens, and you are left to face it all alone.
This film is quiet. But so is Al Qahr. It doesn’t always explode. It sits in the silence, the delays, the indifference. It’s in the resignation on people’s faces. In how they stop expecting anything better. This is not a story about a fridge. It’s what we’ve learned to live with – or without.