Habibi

Different people in Cairo, each without someone they loved. A mother with her grown son on her lap. An old man alone in a grand salon. Two men in a barbershop. A woman at a window looking at nothing. Nobody explains their loss. The rooms do.

The rooms are museums of absence — objects left behind by people who aren't there anymore. A dressing table with a hairbrush, perfume, kohl. A matchbox with one match left. The people in the frames are the ones who stayed. The ones who left are only visible in what they touched.

The fire in the final act is not destruction — it's release. The rooms that held the memory are consumed. The objects that proved someone was here turn to ash.

The transition from Umm Kulthum to Tamino is the film's hinge — old Cairo love to new, Arabic to English, the mother's generation to the son's. The music itself is the collision.

The biggest challenge was visual consistency across interior scenes. Each location was treated as its own world — the salon, the barbershop, the corridor — building consistency within locations rather than across them. Fire frames were generated separately using the non-burning versions as references.