Laila

Laila Lives in a fake eastern society where all women should wear a veil and the only way of marriage is to be selected by a man, she refuses this tradition and gets involved in a forbidden love story.

  • Youssef Mousa
    Director
  • Mariem Amr
    Key Cast
    "Laila"
  • Moheb Ibrahiem
    Key Cast
    "Yehya"
  • Lobna Shahin
    Key Cast
    "Lobna"
  • Youssef Nasser
    Director of photography
  • Youssef Mousa
    Writer
  • Michael Medhat
    Music Composer
  • Omar Gawish
    Editor
  • Ahmed Elshafey
    Colorist
  • Belal Salah
    Sound
  • Khaled mohamed
    Mixing
  • Michael Medhat
    Sound design
  • Youssef Mousa
    Producer
  • Ammar El Sokkary
    Cameraman
  • Abdelrhman Helmy
    Cameraman
  • Alaa Helal
    Costume designer
  • Youssef Ayman
    Assistant director
  • Hadeer Hosny
    Assistant director
  • Project Title (Original Language):
    ليلى
  • Project Type:
    Short, Student
  • Genres:
    Drama, Romance
  • Runtime:
    8 minutes 19 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    November 21, 2021
  • Production Budget:
    1,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Egypt
  • Country of Filming:
    Egypt
  • Language:
    Arabic
  • Aspect Ratio:
    2.39:1
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
  • ROFIFE rotary international film festival

    Turkey
    February 15, 2022
    Official Selection
  • Clapperboard golden festival

    Brazil
    March 14, 2022
    Official Selection
  • First-time filmmaker sessions

    United Kingdom
    Official Selection
  • LIFT-OFF global network sessions

    United Kingdom
    Official Sellection
  • Student cuts film festival

    Slovenia
    May 12, 2022
    Official Selection
  • İnönü University 14. International Short Film Fest

    Turkey
    May 4, 2022
    Finalist
  • Durban Film Mart

    South Africa
    Official Selection
Director Biography - Youssef Mousa

Youssef Mousa is a filmmaker based in Giza, Egypt. He is a current university student at the faculty of science and works part-time as a programmer and teacher. Mousa has a lot of interests and hobbies, and he uses most of them to enhance his filmmaking process. He didn't study filmmaking in an academic way, but he depended on self-learning and began his first steps working on short films. Youssef writes his own films and he is having a past experience writing novels too, but he loves cinema more than any other thing that he feels reborn every time he watches a good movie, so he found his long and hard journey of making a film to be magical and entertaining. He hopes to extend it with more and more journies till he brings his first feature out.

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Director Statement

This film will always be special for me because it's my first step towards turning my writings and ideas magically into visible scenes. Yea, it wasn't an easy process so far but it was an extremely enjoyable journey. I choose this film to be my first short because I totally believe that we all should stand against such cases and feel how conquered women are at some places in the world and forced to fit in their society rules while being muted and having no right to say a single word, just because they are women. Some of the challenges making this film included creating a whole separate fake world looking like most middle eastern countries but it's actually not, finding locations and shooting the whole film in only one day to reduce costs and increase quality. Working with this crew was a great plus, almost all of them were working only for passion just because they believed in how well this film will be created and the idea itself. We all actually were fortunate to work together having such a wonderful experience that we wish to go through again and again and we really hope for everyone to be part of it by watching our film "Laila".