Shams

Eden, a thirty-year-old Belgian woman living in Cairo, wakes to find that her girlfriend, Shams, has vanished without a word. What begins as worry quickly becomes a frantic search for clues through a city where their relationship could never be spoken of openly, and where every question Eden asks risks exposing them both. Retracing Shams's last days, Eden confronts how little she truly knew about the woman she loves, and how much Shams may have been protecting her from. Pauline Beugnies's short film Shams is a taut, atmospheric mystery and a quietly devastating love story, capturing the loneliness of loving someone in a place where you must remain invisible. Claire Beugnies, Reem El-Maghraby, and Zainab Magdy star.