“Love is about understanding and accepting the other”: Mohammad Siam on My Father’s Scent at Red Sea International Film Festival 2025

Transitioning from meticulously depicting reality in documentaries to crafting narrative fiction is no easy feat. However, Mohammad Siam brilliantly accomplished this with his film My Father’s Scent, which successfully maintains the Egyptian director’s characteristic thematic intensity.

In this interview with The Upcoming, Siam explained how the movie explores complex father-son dynamics in a deeply personal narrative, inspired by the memory of his late father. The movie itself is a tense, poetic odyssey that unfolds over one night, as a father and son confront each other within a single apartment, peeling back layers of their fraught relationship. He described how his stylistic choices create an emotionally touching and relatable story, set in a somewhat melancholic Alexandria. The feature delivers a simple yet profound message, underscoring that we must learn to understand and accept the vulnerabilities of those closest to us.

Laura Della Corte

My Father’s Scent does not have a release date yet.

Watch the trailer for My Father’s Scent here: