This Oscar season, it’s possible you’ll end up falling in love with an eight-year-old maid and celebrating Completely satisfied Birthday. That’s the title of the coming-of-age drama movie, directed and co-written by Sarah Goher in her characteristic directorial debut, which is Egypt’s submission for the most effective worldwide characteristic class on the 2026 Oscars. Jamie Foxx is a producer on the film, starring newcomer Doha Ramadan, Nelly Karim, Hanan Motawie, Sherif Salama, and Aly Sobhy.
It was co-written by Goher’s life and artistic associate, Mohamed Diab. The duo beforehand additionally labored collectively on the Marvel sequence Moon Knight, starring Oscar Isaac, in addition to Diab’s Conflict and Bus 671. Completely satisfied Birthday was produced by Ahmed El Desouky for SkyLimit Manufacturing.
The movie tells the story of Doha, the already-mentioned younger maid, who works for an upper-class household and Cairo and is set to not let anybody cease her from throwing an ideal party for her pal, her employer’s daughter. Within the course of, Completely satisfied Birthday explores “points of sophistication, energy, and belonging by means of the eyes of an harmless little one,” as a preview for the film on the web site of the twenty ninth version of the Tallinn Black Nights Movie Competition (PÖFF), the place it begins screening on Saturday, notes.
The film premiered on the Tribeca Movie Competition in June, the place it received the awards for finest worldwide narrative characteristic and finest screenplay in such a characteristic, together with the Nora Ephron Award.
For Goher, the movie got here from private expertise. The Egyptian was born and raised in New York, however would spend summers together with her grandmother in Cairo. “The one different child my age in my grandma’s condo was this little woman, and I believed she was prolonged household,” the filmmaker tells THR. “We’d play, and he or she was essentially the most enjoyable factor for me each time I’d go to Egypt. After which after a few summers, I spotted she was my grandma’s maid.”
The woman one summer time was not there, and Goher later realized that noone was speaking about this as a result of having younger maids was not authorized however frequent. “Little one labor just isn’t allowed in Egypt, however there’s this grey space the place households in Egypt, if not on this era, in a earlier era have a toddler round them that was on this limbo,” Goher explains. “In order that grew to become the inspiration for this movie.”
She knew that casting the younger lead was key. “I knew very properly early on that I needed to solid the woman proper, or else the entire thing would disintegrate, and I wished a woman who understood the socio-economic world of the character,” Goher shares. She and the inventive group used road casting, Fb, TikTok and the like.
‘Completely satisfied Birthday’
Courtesy of PÖFF
In the long run, she requested to satisfy 60 women on the Cairo Opera Home for about eight hours. “I wished all of them dressed the identical so nobody would know who was from the great neighborhood and who was from the [poorer] neighborhood,” Goher remembers. “I had these women dancing and singing, doing mirror workouts, respiration workouts, and improvisations across the movie. After which, in a short time, when you’ve gotten children by themselves, away from their dad and mom, and with different children, they actually open up in a approach that you simply begin to see rather a lot about them rapidly.”
Younger Doha Ramadan stood out. “She’s such a assured and artistic woman,” says Goher. “She would inform me these loopy tales about herself, her buddies, and about issues in her neighborhood, and these scary tales that they inform one another. And I spotted that the children who’re actually good actors are actually good storytellers.”
The 2 labored carefully all through the method. “I wanted her to grasp that that is fiction,” Goher explains. “And I wished to have her enter into her character, as a result of I didn’t wish to be projecting a narrative from my creativeness about somebody like her.”
The filmmaker hopes that audiences will fall in love with the character of Toha identical to a few of her buddies who will not be into youngsters did. “They don’t need children, however they fell in love with Doha and Toha. Neither has any sense of self-pity,” Goher tells THR. “Just like the character, Doha doesn’t see the tragedy of her life. She simply needs to reside it like, and that’s one thing I feel all of us have to see.”
The filmmaker didn’t wish to wrap the movie and ship Ramadan again to her personal life with out paying again effort and time for all of the younger expertise’s work on the film, so she created an “enrichment program.” In spite of everything, Ramadan didn’t know easy methods to learn after they began filming, regardless that she memorized the whole script, together with all the opposite actors’ traces. “As quickly as we completed taking pictures the movie, I acquired her a non-public tutor to show her studying and writing,” Goher tells THR. “And I additionally enrolled her on the Opera Home, which has a gifted youth heart, so she’s been taking ballet there.”
Concludes the Completely satisfied Birthday director: “I wished her to see herself as an artist, as a result of in her socio- financial class, artwork just isn’t one thing that’s a precedence. I wanted to offer her an outlet that she might proceed to observe. And I’m very grateful for her mom and her household, who’ve been utterly supportive and cooperative all through this whole course of.”