Voyage

A Voyage is a film presenting the lives of 3 artists: two painters, namely, Ashraf Raslan and Ghada Abdelmalek, who graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo, Egypt in the same year, as Ashraf did. The third is a zincograph, Mohamed Haridy, the villager, who dug in all aspects of art and production, but couldn’t live a city life.
After, they passed through the first phase that all artists go through in a city life, they all chose to live in solitude in a remote neighborhood of Giza, Egypt. That was in order to be able to create their true identity and genuine self. They refused the peer pressure of the city and heavy pace of modern life.

Ashraf Raslan came from Damietta, an East-northern city of Egypt, in the nineties to start practicing his art in the capital city, Cairo. In the film, he tells about his own created life, and his existential experience, in committed search of the purity of his artworks in terms of beauty and organism.
His artist colleague, Ghada Abdelmalek, coming from mixed origins: Egyptian and Greek. She was born and brought up in Mansoura, a town in the north of the Delta in Egypt. Her parents lived within the cosmopolitan communities near Mansoura harbor. She tells her story within her family rich history, an important part of Egypt’s contemporary history.
Joining them, the zincograph Mohamed Haridy, the village man, of Gipsy people, comes from Qalyoub, a village adjacent to Cairo. He moves to start his art practice in the Khedival Cairo, but actually the major part of his production takes place during his solitude in the new structured remote area of Giza. His art products come to life in sad ironic impressions.

The film witnesses the history of the art in Egypt, with its major shifts during the eighties and nineties. The film director, Sayed Abdelkhalek, witnessed that by himself during his childhood in Shobra neighborhood of Cairo. He met Raslan and Abdelmalek in the Faculty of Fine Arts in 1996, and they met again to shoot this film within an art residency in 2009. This experience uncovered, for Abdelkhalek, new perspectives of plastic art creation, phases and steps into completion, to reach people, telling about a personal experience. Yet, it belongs to the whole humanity.