Aisha Can't Fly Away

Hardly any genre has fed world cinema in recent years the way body horror has. In work from Asia, Latin America and Africa it becomes clear how closely questions of body, identity and inequality are bound together — and how the image of the deformed body opens up room for liberation and resistance. “Aisha Can’t Fly Away” by the Egyptian director Morad Mostafa is further proof: a film that sets a political and poetic metamorphosis in motion from inside a social drama.

At its centre is Aisha, a young Sudanese care worker in Cairo. Her daily life moves between migration, racism and exploitation: her landlord blackmails her, an old man abuses her, a gang war rages in the streets. Only in brief moments — with a disabled boy, or in the solidarity of her colleagues — does she meet with affection.

Mostafa tells this at first with the severity of a milieu drama. But surreal images surface in Aisha’s inner struggle: the figure of an ostrich, oscillating between a fantasy of escape and a transformation, and finally a metamorphosis that makes her body both the battlefield of violence and the site of her liberation. The political and the intimate fuse; Aisha’s body becomes the terrain of oppression and of self-assertion. With its world premiere at Cannes (“Un Certain Regard”), “Aisha Can’t Fly Away” showed where world cinema is currently speaking at its most radical and most exciting.

Shown at the 2025 edition of Around the World in 14 Films, Berlin.

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