This Oscar season, chances are 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 function directorial debut, which is Egypt’s submission for the perfect worldwide function 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 amazing birthday celebration for her pal, her employer’s daughter. Within the course of, Completely satisfied Birthday explores “points of sophistication, energy, and belonging by way of the eyes of an harmless baby,” 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 gained the awards for greatest worldwide narrative function and greatest screenplay in such a function, 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 residence was this little lady, 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 lady one summer season was now not there, and Goher later realized that noone was speaking about this as a result of having younger maids was not authorized however frequent. “Baby labor is just not 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 turned the inspiration for this movie.”
She knew that casting the younger lead was key. “I knew very effectively early on that I needed to forged the lady proper, or else the entire thing would collapse, and I needed a woman who understood the socio-economic world of the character,” Goher shares. She and the inventive staff 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 needed all of them dressed the identical so nobody would know who was from the great neighborhood and who was from the [poorer] neighborhood,” Goher recollects. “I had these women dancing and singing, doing mirror workout routines, respiration workout routines, and improvisations across the movie. After which, in a short time, when you’ve got youngsters by themselves, away from their mother and father, and with different youngsters, they actually open up in a means that you just begin to see quite a bit about them rapidly.”
Younger Doha Ramadan stood out. “She’s such a assured and artistic lady,” says Goher. “She would inform me these loopy tales about herself, her mates, 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 needed 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 similar to a few of her mates who aren’t into youngsters did. “They don’t need youngsters, 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 desires to stay 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 find out how to learn after they began filming, though she memorized the complete script, together with all the opposite actors’ traces. “As quickly as we completed taking pictures the movie, I acquired her a personal 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 needed her to see herself as an artist, as a result of in her socio- financial class, artwork is just not one thing that’s a precedence. I wanted to provide her an outlet that she may proceed to comply with. And I’m very grateful for her mom and her household, who’ve been fully supportive and cooperative all through this complete course of.”
