Last-minute birthday cake shopping: kind of a headache in every country.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits…

As someone who watches every Marvel Cinematic Universe installment for better or worse, I’ve found it interesting to see what filmmakers do next after they’ve done their time in the machine. Sometimes they move on to equally gargantuan pop-culture universes (The Mandalorian, Superman). Sometimes they have a ball in their own sandboxes (Sinners, Wolfs). Sometimes they give the impression Marvel broke their brains (The Gray Man, Fast X). Sometimes they step back from Hollywood excess and find fulfillment in smaller works (Next Goal Wins, the upcoming Hamnet).

Case in point: our next film, Happy Birthday — Egypt’s official submission for Best International Feature at the next Academy Awards — comes to us from the talents of writer/director Sarah Goher, who was on the writing staff of Moon Knight, and her co-writer and longtime creative partner Mohamed Diab, who directed four of the show’s six episodes. (Two other writers receive a “Story By” credit, but as of today I can’t verify their names online for some reason.) Its total budget was probably less than what they paid the VFX team in charge of rendering Khonshu’s skull, but sometimes an indie film is just as capable, if not more so, of slipping through your jaded defenses with its sincerity right before it breaks your heart.

The central figure of Happy Birthday is an eight-year-old maid, which is the very phrase that leads off the official plot description and lets you know up front this is not necessarily the neighborhood outside your window. Tremendous li’l acting prodigy Doha Ramadan plays Toha, an eight-year-old maid who’s able and willing to handle the family chores — cooking, cleaning, straightening, helping Grandma (Hanan Youssef) take her insulin shots, changing the propane tank under the stove when it’s empty, banging on the wrench with her tiny girly hands to get the valve to unscrew, and so on. It’s a living!

Toha is great friends with boss’ daughter Nelly (Khadija Ahmed), who’s some months older than her and soon turning 9. They spend as much time together as they can whenever the adults aren’t awake or around, and whenever Toha isn’t on the clock, and now she wants to help arrange the greatest birthday party of all times. But her boss/Nelly’s mom Laila (Nelly Karim) has a lot going on — she’s in the middle of a contentious divorce from Nelly’s allegedly two-timing dad (Sharif Salamah) and has most of their possessions boxed up for an impending move out of their fancy gated community. That conflict lasts about three minutes till Mom and Grandma decide they just can’t hand Nelly another disappointment. Toha is one big bright bundle of excitement.

As they put the party together, little disparities emerge between Toha’s station and Nelly’s. A shopping excursion with Laila to an outdoor mall has the lighthearted moments of a de facto mother/daughter day on the town — fun whenever Nelly accedes to Toha’s nifty party suggestion, not so fun when clerks note her distinctive scarf that serves as a giant “SERVANT” name tag and (mis)treat her accordingly. Her preternatural shrewdness shines particularly in the bakery scene where she negotiates the sort of cake they want to bring Nelly, one that isn’t just among the mass-produced generic options already on display. Then someone hurls an unexpected wrench into Toha’s day that deletes her itinerary and threatens to keep her from attending the very party that she’s helping orchestrate. Can this plucky, resourceful young lady finagle her way back to the perfect party after all?

Economic status comes to the fore later when we learn Toha isn’t actually living with Laila’s family and isn’t some abandoned street orphan they bought at a bazaar. We meet Toha’s mom (Hanan Motawie) and her many sisters, all of whom are alive and well and happy to see Toha in their own respective fashions. Life on the other side of the community gate (and beyond the long bus ride between the two locations) certainly isn’t the same. In either setting Ms. Ramadan nimbly portrays how Toha has developed the tools to cope with each half of her life as needed. She obviously prefers one over the other, but most days she doesn’t necessarily have to be self-conscious about the firm line between the family and the help — a boundary that’s acceptable unless she suddenly faces its strict enforcement.

Clearly these aren’t the supernormal sides of Egypt that Goher and Daib had fun with in Moon Knight, though glimmers of our pop culture peek in amid the slice-of-life vignettes (an ugly bootleg Watchmen sweater, a young party-goer in Spidey face-paint). Character work is key above all else, though they do have fun with a tuk-tuk sequence that’s lightly unnerving you-are-there verite from within the perils of Cairo traffic at night, more realistic than the flashy tuk-tuk chase in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. To confirm we aren’t too far from home, they eventually address the Western audience’s nagging question, “Wait, is household child labor normal in Egypt?” (It depends on which character you ask.)

This’ll maybe sound more than a bit weird, but going into Happy Birthday, I expected some mild resemblances to another film called Tótem, which was Mexico’s 2023 official submission for that year’s Best International Feature Oscar category (still streaming on the Criterion Channel) and whose plot came to mind when I ran across Happy Birthday on Heartland’s site. Their commonalities are few but nonetheless striking enough to recommend a potential double-feature: both films are about a tiny girl who helps throw a birthday party for a loved one, where everyone has an awesome time and Our Heroine gets a show-stopping musical performance, but then reality sinks in like an anvil dropped from on high, and the end forces us to linger on a phenomenal shot of our main child actress holding and wrestling some haunting inner realizations.

Indeed, Toha enjoys a most unusual dance number that’s either a liberating exaltation or Little Miss Sunshine cringe, depending on the watcher. And her final, lengthy scene plays like an homage to the end of Michael Clayton — not a happy-ending ride into the sunset, but a gradual meditation on where one truly stands with one’s peers, and the despair that tomorrow will never be the same. Happy Birthday‘s parting gift is the wounding irony in a friendship that transcends class distinctions only for as long as the grown-ups allow it.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Couple years ago, Nelly Karim was in a film with Mira Sorvino and The Deer Hunter‘s John Savage called The Goat. Drilling down even farther, an actor named Hazem Ehab who had a bit part in Moon Knight as a guard has a bigger scene here as the cake-shop baker, who’s a sucker for a sob story. From a limited Western perspective, that’s as deep as the casting bench gets.

I almost never care about producer credits, but hey, Academy Award Winner Jamie Foxx is among its producers, so there’s that.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Happy Birthday end credits, but four of the actors are listed as “special appearances”, so I trust they’re each kind of a big deal in Egypt. The Special Thanks section includes some familiar names, including actress Valeria Golino (Rain Man, Big Top Pee-Wee) and Robert DeNiro, co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival, where this held its world premiere last June. Here’s hoping someday it’ll reach an audience outside the festival circuit.