Both were produced in , before the recent uprising. Casting attractive actors often with a background in TV , Diab has crafted an audience-friendly fiction film on the distressing topic of sexual harassment.
In the credit sequence female hands deftly weave copper wire into jewelry: a delicate piece depicting a dancing couple. We cut to an exterior of the bus whose number gives the film its title. We flash back one year to our second protagonist. Wealthy Seba is a jewelry designer, married to a doctor, who feels secure enough to jog in the street. The great squares and boulevards throbbing with football fans are of course now familiar to foreigners too: soon they would be convulsed by political activists.
In a typically pointed detail, Seba will be abducted and abused by male aggressors even while her face is painted fan-style in national colors. Rejected by her husband and advised by mother to keep quiet, she miscarries a baby. Cairo Courtesy of Fortissimo Films. Our third protagonist is Nelly.
Unsafe even in the call center where she works, she is constantly hit on by clients on the phone. Here once more there is a quiet commentary on politics and nationalism. As Nelly is interrogated in the police station, Hosni Mubarak, in an official photo, looks stolidly on.
But Diab is never Manichean. Still the film permits itself some telling political asides. The policeman asks for an informer to be put on every bus.
