Yomeddine (Abu Bakr Shawky, 2018) (Patreon)

Woe be to the Un Certain Regard level film that somehow gets bumped up to Competition. After all, considering the fact that Yomeddine is a debut film, it is fairly accomplished. It's a relatively observational film about the plight of Beshay (Rady Gamal), a scarred man formerly afflicted with leprosy, who has never strayed from the colony in Egypt where his father deposited him as a boy. Following the death of his wife, Beshay decides to finally leave the colony and return to his childhood home to see if he still has a family, and if they want him. A scrapper and garbage picker by trade, Beshay has an apprentice of sorts in Obama (Ahmed Abdelhafiz), a Nubian orphan who cathects onto the older man as a father figure.

So indeed, we have a moppet / curmudgeon duet, with Beshay reluctantly (at first) taking Obama along on his journey. Shawky makes some rookie errors as a filmmaker, following formula a bit too closely. The trip is arduous and the pair are beset by various obstacles. They eventually fall in with a ragtag bunch of street people, all of whom have some physical difference from the norm (amputation, dwarfism, limited mobility). This is a site of acceptance after having been subject to various humiliations and prejudices, if not for being deformed, then for being a Christian in a Muslim-majority nation. None of this is handled with any particular subtlety. At one point, the director actually stages an awkward homage to The Elephant Man.

Nevertheless, Yomeddine partakes of a rather inoffensive brand of mawkishness. There is some wry byplay between the two leads, and as a performer Gamal radiates a quiet confidence. Like many contemporary films from the Arab world, Yomeddine concerns itself with society's downtrodden, and even if it never rises to the level of genuinely compelling cinema, it is at least willing to broach the sort of shaggy-dog humor that you'd never see in a truly God-awful film like Capernaum. Supposing Shawky's film were inconspicuously nestled somewhere in the TIFF Contemporary World Cinema lineup, it would be met with a firm, respectful nod, and swiftly forgotten.

(NB: Uh oh, I think I may have unconsciously rewrote Mike's review, aside from the part about Hot Pockets. In my defense, it's the sort of film there's not much to say about.)