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Sherif el-Azma’s 52-minute video consists of improvised scenarios involving a cadre of stewardesses for a third-world airline. The first part of the video follows them through their training: the young women interrogate one another in varying tempo, learning how to be friendly yet reveal nothing about themselves. In the second part, two of the stewardesses work the first-class cabin of a turbulent flight. As the flight wears on, the refreshments run out, the real lapses into the fantastic and the stewardesses drift into strange and terrifying new spaces. The video’s evocative imagery—an older stewardess and her protégé walking in high heels through a desert—is at once comic and tragic and just slick enough to be uncanny. The simple sets are a deadpan foil for the absurd events that unfold within them. Samuel Beckett’s dramatic work comes immediately to mind.

Pilot for a Soap Opera about an Egyptian Air Hostess

2003