Review: ‘The Stories’ — Abu Bakr Shawky’s noisy, nostalgic love letter to Egypt

TORONTO: Egyptian filmmaker Abu Bakr Shawky’s “The Stories,” which opened this year’s Toronto Arab Film Festival last week, is a love letter of sorts to his homeland, set across three decades from the 1960s to the 1980s. The film follows Ahmad (Amir El-Masry), an aspiring concert pianist from a middle-class Cairo family, whose life is sent down a different path when his pen-pal correspondence with Elizabeth (Valerie Pachner), a young Austrian woman, blossoms into something more.

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