Sara Ishaq's 'The Mulberry House' to screen at Cimatheque

CAIRO – 30 March 2018: Sarah Ishaq's 2013 documentary film "The Mulberry House" will be screening at Cimatheque – Alternative Film Centre on Tuesday April 3, 2018, and again on Tuesday April 10.

The film follows Ishaq as she returns to her fatherland of Yemen after living abroad for 10 years in Scotland, the country where her mother came from, following the divorce of her parents. Ishaq had not been in the country since she was 17, and she is now a grown woman. It's a deeply personal look at how alienated one can feel in what is supposed to be their home, and how the merciless tide of time can forever change what was once familiar. Ishaq returns to Yemen just before the outbreak of the Arab Spring, which forever changed the face of democracy in the Arab world and had far reaching effects even beyond it.

It wasn't what she expected when she planned to return home, and the documentary follows how she adapts to this massive change. As the Arab Spring breaks out, Ishaq is front and center with her camera and records everything, becoming a valuable witness to the BBC. Rather than create a film entirely about Yemen during the revolutions, Ishaq centers the film on how her family deals with the upheaval all around them, while also examining her place caught between two worlds, a stranger in both her homelands, and how she still manages to work out an identity regardless of it all.
Serving as a diary of Ishaq's experiences, "The Mulberry House" provides a valuable and priceless look at how an Arab household reacted, real-time, to the events of the Arab spring.