Diagonale 2026 Review: THE STORIES Turns Familiar Tragicomic Family Saga Tropes into Finetuned Crowd-pleaser
Abu Bakr Shawky's film unfolds as a multi-generational family saga that situates an intimate love story within the shifting social and political landscape of Egypt from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Egyptian-Austrian filmmaker Abu Bakr Shawky’s latest film, The Stories, is a tragicomic family saga set against historical events unfolding in Egypt between the 1960s and 1990s, inspired by his parents’ love story.
While The Stories hits every major beat and trope of multi-generational family chronicles, Shawky ensures they are finely tuned rather than merely repeated. Even though the film follows an expected trajectory with only minor, less predictable digressions, unfolding as an emotional rollercoaster of sentimentality, pathos, melodrama, melancholy and mandatory jokes, it remains well-calibrated and engaging, despite its 120-minute running time.
Young Ahmed (Amir El-Masry) lives in a small apartment in Cairo within a chaotic household shared with his sprawling family and a coterie of uncles and friends constantly passing through. The household is restless, shaped by his two brothers, an anxious mother constantly occupied with chores and an angry father who lives in a state of paranoia after misspeaking on national television about corruption.
Ahmed aspires to become a classical pianist, though his training sessions are frequently disrupted, not least by an even angrier upstairs neighbour. On a whim, he begins writing letters to a mysterious pen pal, Elizabeth (Valerie Pachner), in Vienna, responding to a magazine ad. What starts as an impulse develops into a long-distance love story that keeps evolving into a stable partnership.
Shawky’s filmmaking has consistently gravitated toward peripheral figures navigating environments that exceed their agency. In Yomeddine, this took the form of a marginal protagonist traversing Egypt in search of belonging, rendered through a restrained observational style. With Hajjan, Shawky relocated this sensibility to Saudi Arabia, embedding a coming-of-age trajectory within a more conventional genre framework while retaining an emphasis on physical endurance and social marginality.
The Stories sees a family struggle against both large and small historical, social and political upheavals across decades. Ahmed and his brother deal with problems of different scales as Ahmed tries to eke out a living teaching piano while moving through the stages of romance, from initial correspondence to meeting his Austrian partner, winning over her father and eventually starting a family in Cairo, navigating life’s peaks and setbacks. Shawky includes a recurring family ritual of rooting for Zamalek SC, whose persistent underdog status mirrors both the family’s trajectory and Ahmed’s own life.
The Stories is not only a multi-generational story but also a multi-genre one, anchored by the protagonist and his partner, with Shawky combining coming-of-age, family melodrama and romance, comedy and a surprising shift into thriller territory when war breaks out and unrest spreads through the city, prompting Ahmed and his wife to attempt to rescue a relative. Other digressions include one of Ahmed’s brothers landing a dream job with a football team, though not as he imagined. Shawky builds the narrative on a circular structure, revisiting patterns that underline social shifts and occasionally function as call-back jokes.
Cinematographer Wolfgang Thaler, a long-time collaborator of Ulrich Seidl and Michael Glawogger, lenses the film in sunbathed tones, with the exception of nocturnal sequences during wartime. Even within confined interiors, particularly the crowded family apartment populated by eccentric characters, the image retains a sense of movement. Editor Roland Stöttinger carries much of the film’s rhythm, keeping the pacing fluid so that even at two hours, the decades-spanning story feels light and engaging.
The Stories is by design a feel-good story despite some darker periods, including deaths in the family, set against the backdrop of turbulent events. Despite its autobiographical inspiration, Shawky delivers a message that familial togetherness can withstand life’s and the world’s ebbs and flows, an uplifting notion for darker times that tend to repeat in cycles. Even with an overdose of saccharine and a familiar template, The Stories proves to be a well-needed dose of dopamine, executed with a precise and keen eye for craft.
While The Stories toured the festival circuit, it is ultimately a more mainstream-leaning film, with its arthouse positioning stemming largely from its historical framing of Egypt, against which Ahmed’s family navigates its struggles, ambitions, aspirations, rises, falls and occasional comic missteps. Putting aside the clichés, story tropes and expectable message, it is truly hard not to enjoy the finetuned craft and storytelling.
The film screened at the 2026 Diagonale in Graz, Austria.
The Stories
