When Egyptian filmmaker Abdelrahman Dnewar speaks about his short movie My Brother, My Brother, his voice moves with the same rhythm as the film itself: gentle, searching, full of pauses where memory breathes. Co-directed with his late twin Saad Dnewar, the short blends hand-drawn 2D animation with intimate live-action sequences to turn remembrance into movement.
Most recently screened at the eight edition of the El Gouna Film Festival, where it won Best Short Film in Competition at the CineGouna Emerge Awards, the film marks another highlight in a remarkable journey that has already taken it to more than forty international festivals, including Rotterdam and San Francisco. My Brother, My Brother is a deeply personal story that turns grief into cinema and memory into something almost tangible.
“We started noticing that we each remembered every situation differently,” Dnewar told MILLE. “With twins, you expect sameness since we share the same DNA and the same childhood. But it was those small differences that made each of us who we are. After my brother passed away, I found something beautiful in that.”
Blending fiction and animation, the short defies genre expectations. Its hybrid form becomes part of its message, where memory is both image and imagination, truth and reconstruction. “We wanted to capture the subjective nature of remembering,” Dnewar says. “Time in the film isn’t linear; it’s made of moments that stay.”
The film moves through fragmented recollections — from the darkness of the womb to the stillness of grief, from laughter to silence — dissolving the boundary between what happened and what is felt. The animation, drawn in delicate strokes and layered over analog textures, gives the memories an ethereal quality, while the live-action material grounds them in a physical, lived reality. Together they create a language that feels deeply cinematic yet entirely personal.
The camera lingers on gestures — hands brushing against walls, light falling through half-closed curtains, a door left ajar. Each frame feels like a keepsake. “I like to find form that fits feeling,” Dnewar says. “Sometimes it’s analog, sometimes digital. I even use recordings that lose data over time — like memories fading.”
Now based in Berlin, Dnewar is finishing his directing studies while continuing the creative dialogue that began with his brother. “My new film continues that conversation,” he says. “It’s still about him, but at a different stage of grief.”
However, the story carries one haunting absence–there are no childhood photos of the twins together. “Only one exists,” he says with a faint smile. “And in it, we’re both giving our backs to the camera.” In that void, My Brother, My Brother becomes the photograph that never was, and a cinematic reconstruction of what can no longer be captured. “You can’t trust memory,” Dnewar reflects. “Even the narrator says, ‘I remember my birth very vividly.’ The film isn’t about documenting reality; it’s about how memory transforms it.”
At El Gouna, the film’s Egyptian premiere felt particularly intimate. Surrounded by filmmakers and audiences who shared the same cultural codes, Dnewar described the screening as “a homecoming.”
“Showing it in Egypt is special,” he says. “It’s the first time we share it with an Egyptian audience. It feels like the film finally came home.”
When asked what keeps him making films, he pauses. “It’s something I need to do,” he says quietly. “After my brother passed away, I didn’t want to finish the film. But my friends and family encouraged me. The film changed; it became a way to keep talking to him.”
In My Brother, My Brother, animation becomes a vessel for memory, and cinema becomes a language for loss. Through light, sound, and line, Dnewar makes absence visible, reminding us that the most powerful stories aren’t remembered as they were, but as they continue to live within us.
