Each poster is illustrated with icons. Easily deciphered narratives propagate a message to the masses. Perceptions and associations are drummed into hard held beliefs of an imagined reality.

Likewise, women walking down the streets are spectacles. But instead of embodying static images, they are cast in Cairo’s grand street-art performance. Every woman becomes a character in a film. Her clothes, her walk, where she came from, where she’s going, who is with her, how she travels, how she talks. Her narrative is weaved in minutes by her spectators and packaged into a story exchangeable with one of the characters on the film billboards. She is one of three stock female characters: the eligible maiden, the liberated spinster or the corrupted harlot.

In Film Hindi, I am cast in all the three roles – each a spectacle of the three recurring characters scripted for women in Egyptian films. In Idouly ya Nass she is the Eligible Maiden: solely obsessed by the pursuit of a spouse, wedding, house and happily-ever-after. In Doctora she plays the Liberated Spinster: a pure but forward-looking sprout of the new generation- devoted to mother, father, books and nation. And in Asr el Fassad she is a Harlot: unleashed and wild, tainting the streets and innocent souls with my poison. Women are transformed into movie stars on a daily basis, cast into roles in the imagination of street spectators. Their audience of onlookers decides a fate as two-dimensional as the weak characters in Egyptian films, and within a minute, without being aware of it, they have moved from street, to stage, to spectacle.