Projects in development
Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner
Synopsis
Using the three daily meals—breakfast, lunch and dinner—seventy-year-old Um Tamer has always captivated her forty-five-year-old son Tamer and keep him at home with her. She has always protected him from making any effort or carrying any responsibility. He is the only masculine figure in her life; all these years, she has managed never to let him touch another woman.
Um Tamer’s illness made her realise that treatment of her son as a precious prince has made him grow into a shiftless man who cano’t survive without her. In a vicious race with death, she must defy her possessive love, find the perfect wife who will accept Tamer in all his uselessness, reincarnate herself in the wife-to-be to ensure his survival with a younger mother disguised as his wife and, most importantly, suppress Tamer’s newly discovered urge to escape her grip, which threatens her plans.
DayDream Art Production (Egypt)
Marwa Abdalla, Mohamed Samir
daydream.artproduction@gmail.com
Dolce Vita Films (France)
Claire Chassagne
Director’s statement
Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner is a tragicomedy that examines the idea of tyranny disguised as love and overcaring. This kind of tyranny is very hard to recognise and it expresses a philosophical paradox: Would you trade your freedom for heaven? From the heart of this paradox stems a very attractive cinematic world I am trying to explore, one constructed of the juxtapositions of opposites, darkness vs. light, comedy vs. tragedy, love vs. possession.
Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner is a dark tragedy treated as bright comedy. It explores the pain that is necessary for the growth needed to become independent; it is about how much one is willing to trade comfort for hardship as the price for becoming a free individual.
Biographies
Mohamed Samir has diverse experience in the film industry. He graduated as a film editor in 2002 and, in 2007, founded DayDream Art Production, one of the first independent production companies in Egypt, which has produced projects including Mohamed Khan’s Factory Girl. He was appointed Artistic Director of the Cairo International Film Festival in 2014. Recently, Samir has focussed on writing and directing, starting with the short film A Normal Day and the feature-length project Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner.
Marwa Abdalla is an Egyptian film producer, lecturer and cultural manager. She obtained a PhD in Film Studies from Cairo University in 2017 and is currently the artistic and managing director of the Jesuit Cairo Film School and works as a producer for DayDream Art Production. Her most recent production is the short film A Normal Day. Currently, she is producing the feature-length project Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner.
Claire Chassagne is a French producer based in Paris. In 2014, she started to work for Dolce Vita Films, a company with a strong track record of international co-productions including Partho Sen-Gupta’s Sunrise (Busan 2014, Tribeca 2015) and SLAM (Tallinn Black Nights 2018), and Mehdi Barsaoui’s A Son (Venice Orrizonti 2019). Chassagne has produced several shorts and now develops international fiction and documentary projects.
€570 000
€39 000
Cairo Film Connection Award, Meditalents Co-production Forum (Région Sud Award)
January 2023, Cairo, Egypt
May 2023
Financial support, artistic consultations, sales agent, TV pre-sale, Equity investment
