‘Voy! Voy! Voy!’: Rotterdam Review

Dir/scr: Omar Hilal. Egypt/United Arab Emirates. 2023. 109mins

That old adage about truth being stranger than fiction holds firm in Voy! Voy! Voy!, a madcap adventure based on real-life events. It follows an Egyptian man who pretends to lose his sight so he can join the country’s blind football team and head to the league’s world cup in Portugal — where he plans to disappear into a new life in Europe. It is a premise which gives debut feature director Omar Hilal plenty of scope for both comedy and pathos, although he leans more heavily on the former to entertaining effect.

An undercurrent of desperation and displacement gives a poignancy to ’Voy! Voy! Voy!’, which is otherwise played for laughs

Produced by Egyptian powerhouse Mohamed Hefzy (Hajjan, Huda’s Salon), Voy! Voy! Voy! became Egypt’s highest-grossing film of 2023 and has been chosen as the country’s Oscar entry. That should help this colourful, accessible film, which has its European premiere in Rotterdam, find wider attention, and it may well secure a home with a curated streamer.

‘Life is strange,’ remarks an opening voiceover — but that doesn’t come close to describing the story that will unfold. Thirty-something Hassan El Sayed Aly (Mohamed Farrag) lives in Sharm El Sheikh with his ageing mother (Hanan Youssef) and is stuck in a dead-end job, his hard-won university degree proving no help in a land of limited opportunity. His already-meagre prospects are shrunk still further by the political volatility which surrounds him. The film is set in 2013; the year in which the Egyptian army forcibly removed the country’s democratically elected President from power — events that are never overtly foregrounded, but reflected in TV footage, occasional street scuffles and Hassan’s desperation to leave his country for new opportunities abroad.

That goes a long way towards explaining why, having discovered the existence of the local blind football team which is heading for the World Cup in Poland, Hassen decides to feign loss of sight — complete with white stick and sunglasses — and try out for the squad. He impresses newly-minted coach Captain Adel (Bayoumi Fouad), who also hopes that the team’s glory will lead to better things for himself and his son, who is confined to a wheelchair. Before he boards that plane, however, Hassan must face numerous obstacles such as the attentions of local journalist Engy (Nelly Karim, a standout amongst the film’s limited female roles) and the increasing suspicion of the club’s goalkeeper — the only sighted team member.

Based on events from 2015, when Egypt’s al-Eiman Paralympic club was investigated for sending sighted players to a blind football tournament in Poland, Voy! Voy! Voy! — named after the Spanish for ‘here I come’, which the players must shout out to avoid on-pitch collisions — has a huge amount of fun with its imagined backstory. Animated opening titles, reminiscent of those for Catch Me If You Can, set the tone for this shaggy dog story, which is grounded by warm performances and fast-paced humour. Crucially, given his potentially offensive behaviour, Farrag is particularly endearing as the hapless Hassan, never letting us forget that his foolhardy attitude — which, early on in the film, also includes bedding an octogenarian English tourist — is fuelled by his unerring belief that escape is his only option. “I’ve lived my whole life programmed to get out of here,” he says plaintively, in one rare moment of raw vulnerability.

This undercurrent of desperation and displacement gives a poignancy to Voy! Voy! Voy!, which is otherwise played for laughs. Hilal’s screenplay is fast-paced and funny, trading on easy banter between Hassad and other characters — particularly friends Saeed (Taha Desouky) and Amr Edra (Amgad El Haggar) — and delivered with spot-on timing by an excellent cast. A bold colour palette, snappy editing from Ahmed Hafez and Sary Hany’s upbeat score give the feel of a Hollywood caper, while some eye-catching framing from cinematographer Yves Sehnaoui  make the most of the Egyptian setting.