Basma Abdel Aziz, LA FILA, 2018

In an unnamed city in North Africa, the Gate – a central authority – took absolute power following the Misguided Events. Citizens are forced to apply for everything – to eat, move and even to be cared for – but the Door remains closed and on the threshold begins to form a long queue of questuanti: the Row.

In this masterpiece Basma Abdel Aziz recounts the months spent in the Row by a humanity plunged into a parallel reality and dangerously similar to the world in which we live. The Row is a vivid and pitiless portrait of what happens beyond the Mediterranean Sea: it tells the distorted reality of a world divided between the disappointment post Arab Spring and the yearned dream to escape from a system that makes it impossible to live.

Basma Abdel Aziz (Cairo, 1976) is a writer, psychiatrist and human rights activist. Columnist of the newspaper al-Shorouk, he won the Sawiris Cultural Award and the Ahmed Bahaa-Eddin Award for his testimony of the violence committed in Egypt by the police.