Almost 15 years after The Virgin, The Copts and Me, director Namir Abdel Messeeh returns to the big screen with an even more intimate portrayal of his family bonds, his inner identity conflicts and his obsessive need to document everything, as if he is an a constant state of anxious awareness that life is nothing but a fleeting glimpse and that we – mere humans – are just passengers of time and space, captive of a universe that both bewilders and frightens us. Navigating between past and present, Egypt and France, tears and laughter, we watch the film not feeling like outsiders but feeling closely knitted to his beautiful family, a family that is relentlessly tired of his camera but always willing to play along, not because they expect him to create a masterpiece but because they realize that they are piece of him and that is what he needs to find peace in this world.  What might seem – from its title – as a movie about loss is actually a movie about love. And by letting us immerse ourselves in the intimate, in the vulnerable but also in the mundane and the amusing, Namir does end up creating a little masterpiece, a little gem of a film that speaks straight to the soul and that reminds us that There is a Life After Siham, his beloved and larger than life mother who monopolizes the screen with her relentless energy and sarcasm. Despite the mourning that permeates throughout the film, we do not feel that anyone has truly passed.  Not only because of the director’s obsessive need to document everything but because his children are laughing, the streets are still beaming with life and because, he too, is a piece of them. Carl Sagan once famously wrote “for small creatures as we, the vastness is only bearable through love”. And for Nameer, it is seems that the “we” is only bearable through documentation   Mouwafak Chourbagui