Official synopsis: While living in isolation, Mona (Mona Hala) and her young son Mickey (Shams Mohamed) await the birth of a new baby while still carrying the weight of the boy’s grandma’s recent death. When her son begins listening to her pregnant belly, convinced his grandmother’s spirit exists inside and wants to return, Mona is unsettled by his quiet certainty. As she struggles to comfort him, she confronts her own fears of failing as a mother, of being unable to fill the absence left behind, and of opening herself to the unknown. With each passing moment, the fragile balance between grief and hope threatens to collapse, forcing her to face the life growing inside her and the love she’s afraid she can’t give.
Writer/director Ahmed Samir’s Egyptian short film Grandma (Teta) deals in quiet horror, with supernatural elements at play along with pregnancy fear-fare themes. It also deals in family trauma, psychological themes, and the processing of grief.
Samir does a deft job of presenting the proceedings as ambiguous enough to be either psychological possibilities or to indeed have otherworldly elements, although two short sequences should address the answer for many viewers. Hala and Mohamed both give solid performances as a family dealing with the loss of a loved one and a new baby on the way. Cinematographer Nohad Nour captures the increasingly tense proceedings wonderfully.
Samir uses a claustrophobic apartment setting from which there is no escape from Mona’s pressures of being an expectant mother with a son who is either having issues dealing with his grandmother’s death — or communicating with her in the afterlife.
Grandma (Teta) screens as part of The 32nd New York African Film Festival, which runs at Film at Lincoln Center from May 7–13, 2025.
