‘Snow White’: Red Sea Review

Dir/scr: Taghrid Abouelhassan. Egypt. 2024. 105mins

Taghrid Abouelhassan deftly balances a tricky combination of romance, female empowerment and raising disability awareness in Snow White. Her refreshing, likeable film is topped by a winning central performance from Mariam Sherif. A big-hearted tale makes for an endearing audience-pleaser that should gain international traction following a premiere at the Red Sea International Film Festival.

A winning central performance from Mariam Sherif

Iman (Sherif) has spent her life fighting the perceptions of people who define her by her height; 119cm, since you asked. Abouelhassan spends some of the early stages of Snow White emphasising Iman’s daily travails as she is routinely ignored, unseen, unheard or brusquely shoved out of the way. Shop counters and bus seats are too high for comfort, every set of stairs looks like a mountain range and there are scenes where Sherif’s head barely makes it into a static frame. There is humour and understanding in these moments but also the sense that Abouelhassan wants to cover the issue quickly, before parking it to one side so she can then focus on who Iman is and what she wants. 

Iman is certainly a romantic, in stark contrast to her routine clerical work in the dusty state archives. Her bedroom signals her true nature with its pretty pinks and shades of strawberry, floral wallpaper and patterned bedspread. A Snow White ornament sits on her bedside table. Her fantasy figure is dashing Egyptian movie star Karim Fahmy who has a good-sport cameo as himself. She also has an ardent on-line suitor in the besotted Amad (Mohamed Mamdouh) although he has never met her and her dating profile has been economical with the truth. Amad is unaware that she is a Little Person and Iman has used every excuse to avoid chatting on video. 

Iman is also a strong champion for her younger, able-bodied sister Saffeya (Nihal Kamal) who has received a marriage proposal from Khaled (Mohamed Gomaa). Khaled’s frosty mother (Safwa) demands an expensive refrigerator as part of the dowry and seeks some reassurance that any grandchildren will not be Little People. Iman is the only one seeking to discover what her sister wants.

Snow White unfolds in an appealing vision of Cairo’s city streets, busy markets, shops and beaches. It playfully embraces some familiar romcom elements from its jaunty score to a split-screen telephone call that evokes the party line era of Doris Day and Rock Hudson, to moments of reckoning at a waterside rendezvous and dream sequences. Abouelhassan also injects an educational element, often around Iman’s meeting with Tarek (Amr The Diesel), a sharp-suited charmer who works as a volunteer at the Dwarfs Syndicate in Alexandria. He invites her to join them. He is a mouthpiece for useful information ( “only 3% of Little People work” , “Egypt has one third of the dwarf population in the world” etc ) but is also a romantic foil for Iman as she has to decide where her heart and future may lie.

The film is built around the notion that sooner or later romantic fantasies must clash with cold reality. Iman will have to reveal her true self to Amad, Saffeya will need to decide what she wants from her marriage and the desirable Karim Fahmy needs to be relegated to the status of a dream figure. Part of the charm of Snow White is the way Abouelhassan sidesteps a conventional happy ending to keep the focus on Iman and the power she repeatedly discovers in being true to herself.