Hayah Trailer

After the tragic death of Hayah's close friend Khaled, her science teacher meets with her in search of answers. Building a parallel story around “dark energy” and “gravity”, two important and opposing forces of the universe, Karim takes Hayah on a mental journey to reconstruct the events that led to Khaled’s death. Through this journey, Hayah will come face to face with the fragile reality of her dangerous game.

Director's commentary:

“Hayah” deals with the delicate balance that a good life must achieve between two kinds of energies we all hold. The energy that pushes us to expand, to do things that challenge our limits, and the energy that keeps our feet on the ground, our sense of responsibility and self control.

Karim, the science teacher, is trying to find out how conscious Hayah is of the dangerous situation she is in. To explore that, he establishes a parallel story, connecting those two kinds of energies with astrophysics and math. “Dark Energy”, in physics, is a mysterious kind of energy that makes the universe expand. Gravity is the force that pushes in the opposite direction and prevents the universe from going out of control. A famous equation, the standard model of physics, can predict everything that happens in the universe. However, as Karim eventually reveals, there is something that can break the equation. And that is: randomness, uncertainty, entropy. Unpredictable events can break havoc and prevent us from being capable of completely predicting what is going to happen next. When you combine an excess of expansive “dark energy” with the natural randomness of the universe, the possibility that disastrous events happen (like Khaled’s accident) increases. Basically: if you play with fire, the chances that you get burnt increase a lot. If your “dark energy, if your expansive energy becomes way more powerful than your moderating energy (gravity, sense of responsibility), the combination of that with the natural randomness of the universe, increases enormously the possibility that something dangerous or damaging will take place. In the film, Hayah comes to terms with the consequences of this dangerous game. Her final act of trying to escape it’s nothing more than the act of acknowledging how fragily her reality was. The final soft and moderate words of Karim on the phone serve to recognize the difficulty of controlling the delicate balance between these two opposing energies during the delicate teenage years.