From Meir, to Meir

This documentary may seem about as specific as you can get--it's about the small town of Meir in Upper Egypt, 400km south of Cairo--but it tells a universal story of our day, the flight from such small towns to the city and the effect that has on the people who stay. The filmmaker Maggie Morgan's grandparents were born in Meir and later moved to Alexandria, where she was born, a pattern repeated by several of the town's prominent families. As we see, however, you can take the people out of Meir, but you can't take Meir out of the people. Generations later, it remains a source of identity and pride, even if, as Nasser Loza explains, the nostalgia is for a place that no longer exists. Morgan's film juxtaposes the town and people of her grandparents' generation with the town and people of today.

Life is hard in today's Meir: many of the families Morgan speaks with rely on money sent from relatives who work in Kuwait and hope for luck in the green card lottery from the US. Then, about two-thirds into the movie, we see how prevalent suicide has become among young people in Meir. It's an unexpected change in tone and drives home just how hard things actually are for today's residents.

By the end, Morgan's questions, posed at the beginning, have a new resonance: How many of us can chose their journey? Who can decide when to leave and when to come back?