Porsche Awards 2013 Winners: Abu Bakr Shawky

Special prize International Film

Abu Bakr Shawky

Zico Coconut Water Water From Another World (test)

I was born in Cairo to an Egyptian father and an Austrian mother. My interest in film came mainly from watching old VHS tapes of black-and-white gangster films as a child. I studied political science and film in Cairo and made some successful sociopolitical documentaries before moving to New York to study an MFA in film at NYU.

My film is the product of a commercial-directing class there, and I have always been fascinated with commercials that have absurd humor. The idea of this commercial came from the notion that coconut water is this strange, tasty product that is so magical it can’t be from earth – hence, an alien/monster ‘from another world’ is drinking it.

It was only a one-day shoot. I had a very talented cast and experienced crew, so shooting went very smoothly. The most time went into the monster. Getting an actor into a mask made out of dozens of pieces of fur to stand still behind a shelf while someone else moved his stick-hands and held the product took a few hours to perfectly master. It also involved a whole test day to check the monster’s look and movement on camera.

The week we shot was also the week that hurricane Sandy hit New York and shut most parts of the city down. Our initial puppeteer had been working on the monster, but his studio got flooded a few days before the shoot and he lost all his work, so we had to scramble to find a replacement, all while a lot of communication and transport in the city was still down.

When we thought the worst of the storm was over, a snowstorm passed through the city on the day of our shoot. Luckily, we were filming almost exclusively interiors and managed to start before the storm hit New York and blocked transportation again.

I want to be a movie director, but I’ve discovered a passion for commercials and have so far shot three specs and I’m currently working on a few more. It is definitely something I would like to do because the challenge of telling a story in only 30 seconds is much bigger and really puts creativity to the test. Also, my home country Egypt has a sprawling commercials market with a lot of creative ideas.

I’m also currently in the process of preparing for a feature to be shot next year in Egypt. It’s a passion project based on a subject of one of my previous documentaries. Again, it will be sociopolitical and tackle some of the struggles Egyptians are facing in their daily lives. I want to make movies about where I come from but for a worldwide audience, to bridge the cinematic gap between the Middle-Eastern and Western audiences. There are so many themes and subjects there that are interesting for worldwide audiences, and the current political turmoil makes this the right time to act upon it.

Egyptian/Austrian, aged 28

NYU Tisch School of the Arts