MY FATHER’S SCENT

Egypt, Norway, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, France, Qatar I 2025 I Arabic dialogue with English subtitles l 96 min

ABOUT FILM

In My Father’s Scent, Egyptian director Mohamed Siam presents an intimate feature film whose international journey began with its world premiere at the Warsaw International Film Festival, before attracting attention at several major festivals and achieving notable critical and audience recognition.

The film begins with a delicate sensory detail — the scent of the father’s cologne — which becomes a narrative key that reopens the doors of memory, leading the son on a complex inner journey to confront absence and revisit a relationship whose questions remain unresolved. The film does not treat memory as a linear timeline, but as a fractured state where different temporalities overlap and where truth intertwines with what we imagine or reconstruct through longing.

What distinguishes My Father’s Scent is its sensitivity in approaching the theme of fatherhood, avoiding easy nostalgia or overt sentimentality. Mohamed Siam employs a clear economy of dialogue and a calm visual language that grants small elements — scents, everyday details, empty spaces — significant symbolic weight. The camera remains close to the characters, yet patient and observant, capturing their internal transformations without imposing interpretation or judgment.

In 2025, the film received several important awards. It won the Audience Award for Best International Film at the fifth edition of the Red Sea International Film Festival, as well as the Best Actor Award at the eighth edition of El Gouna Film Festival. In Europe, it was awarded the Grand Prize and the Cineuropa Award at the Brussels Mediterranean Film Festival – Cinemamed, in addition to Best Production Design for Assem Ali at the 36th edition of the Carthage Film Festival.

Notably, My Father’s Scent received development support from the Malmö Arab Film Days Fund, through a grant provided by the Swedish Film Institute — an early connection that now comes full circle with the film’s screening at the Malmö Arab Film Festival.

In this context, the presentation of My Father’s Scent in Malmö marks a special moment, offering festival audiences the opportunity to experience a film that treats loss as a living trace, and cinema as a space to reclaim what can only be held through image, sound, and memory