Ruba Nadda is nothing if not determined. Producer Daniel Iron of Foundry Films in Toronto had just finished working on Sarah Polley’s Away From Her, when Nadda found him and gave him the script for Cairo Time. Upon reading it, Iron declared it, “Fantastic. I instantly realized this is someone I want to work with forever.” His intuition was sound. “Ruba’s previous feature, Sabah, had a lightness to it as a romance; it had a look and feel that matched the script particularly well. The performances were very good and I was impressed with what she was able to do on a miniscule budget. Her other scripts (Nadda is a prolific writer with several completed screenplays standing by) were vastly different from each other, and it was clear that not only is she a smart, careful writer whose work is all character-based, but she’s a real filmmaker.”
“This is a quiet love story about a woman at a crucial point in her life,” said Iron. “She has a private epiphany and things happen to her that no one will ever know. While they are not overtly life changing, they are fundamentally life changing inwardly and this illuminates the world for her. She finds an inner freedom that perhaps she always had, but being a working mother with kids and a husband who was away a lot, never had the opportunity to explore. This is very different from a “my husband and I are having problems so I’m going to have a fling” story. Cairo Time is beautiful and sad at the same time. The emotions are not clear cut, but there is clarity in their ambiguity.”
In 2005, Atom Egoyan had given the screenplay for Cairo Time to Christine Vachon and Charles Pugliese at Killer Films in New York. Vachon was pleased with the potential of the script, “Cairo Time is a simple and beautiful drama that explores romance from a point of view we haven't really seen before. Couple that with a young, talented writer/director and you have a film that is a perfect fit for Killer Films.”
“I was bowled over by the simplicity and elegance of her script and how it managed to be so emotional without being melodramatic,” added Pugliese. Once they both met Nadda in person, they were enthusiastic about finding a way to become involved with the project. When Daniel Iron came along and the film was established as a Canadian project, Vachon and Pugliese came on board in the capacity of executive producers.
“Killer is a group I have always dreamed of working with,” said Iron. “They have come on to executive produce, consult and help with key casting because their contacts are immense. They’ve been invaluable in every aspect. Ruba and I discovered that we work in the exact same way that they work in terms of producing and creative collaboration.”
The two main challenges of making this film were location, which called for a sophisticated co-production arrangement, and casting a story with only four main characters, two of which carry the film.
Canada has co-production treaties with 80 countries around the world – but not Egypt. Again through Nadda (whom Iron maintains “seems to know everybody in the world because of her film festival attendance.”), Iron was introduced to David Collins of Samson Films in Ireland. They had just completed Once, which garnered a slew of awards including an Oscar. By teaming up with Samson, and making Cairo Time a Canada-Ireland co-production, they were allowed to move forward with filming in a third country.
Collins had met Nadda at a film festival in Mannheim and again in Rotterdam. "I liked the fact that her films explore the themes of Muslim/Western relationships in a natural setting. When I read the script for Cairo Time, it reminded me of the world created in Lost in Translation, with its cross cultural, and ultimately platonic, love story."