• Director(s):

    THOURY (PIERRE)

  • Producer(s):

    ARTE GEIE, PREMIERES LIGNES TELEVISION

  • Territories:

    Worldwide.

  • Production year:

    2013

  • Language(s):

    German, French

  • Rights:

    TV, DVD, NON-THEATRICAL, INTERNET, VOD

Last year in Stockholm, on December 20th, Aliaa Magda Elmahdy demonstrated, naked, in front of the Egyptian embassy in Sweden, alongside two Femen feminist militants, to protest about the integration of religion into Mohammed Morsi’s new constitution plan.

Across her torso, Aliaa had written: “Sharia is not a constitution”. It was her first public appearance since her exile to Sweden.
In Egypt, the photograph, taken as further provocation, has sparked a wave of protest. After receiving death threats in Egypt from the Islamists, having been contested by certain Egyptian feminists, and having been abandoned by her own friends, 21-year old Aliaa fled Egypt in spring 2012.
She had posed naked on her blog “A Rebel’s Diary” at the end of 2011, to denounce the hypocrisy surrounding women’s bodies in the Arab world. Aliaa took her own photo, naked, wearing a pair of red pumps and a red ribbon in her hair.
Arte Reportage went to meet her in Sweden, enquired in Cairo into her teenage years in a conservative family, and interviewed the most die-hard opponents of Aliaa, in particular one Egyptian who filed a lawsuit demanding she be stripped of her nationality. The enquiry also took the crew to Paris and Tel Aviv, to meet feminists who support Aliaa, like the 40 Israeli women who posed naked in solidarity with the young Egyptian.