SYNOPSIS

My Brother, My Brother is the story of a fragmented childhood and adolescence, exploring the worldview of a pair of identical twins: Omar and Wesam. Growing up in a devoutly religious household, with parents who were both doctors, a dichotomy of upbringing leaves the twins longing for answers, torn between religious explanations and scientific ones.

Through a series of interconnected vignettes, the film delves into key moments in their past. It starts with a monologue about Omar’s birth that turns into a conversation, slowly after when his twin brother Wesam pops into existence to disrupt his stream of consciousness. The split ping-pong narrative becomes a complex commentary on the subjectivity of memory and weaves together the intertwined lives of the twins.

The world of Omar and Wesam exists in a space between memory, imagination, and grief. The loss of their mother is a turning point in the story, punctuating the transience of their experience. During her funeral, Omar recounts a dream where Wesam also departs from their world and he slowly withdraws from the narrative.

INTENTION

I started writing this film together with my own twin brother Saad. He came up with the idea after our mother passed away and invited me to create a pingpong narrative between the two of us. Having grown up in a household where religious belief and scientific practice coexisted, we were always puzzled by contradictory ontologies and left longing for answers. We experienced the world in a different way than others – we perceived life from the first instance as something shared by two people –not just the resources in our mother’s womb were divided. Afterward in life, the lines between our identities were always blurry and we both knew that even if we had small differences we shared one face. Being a twin you always have an instinctive fear of being one; of being without the other.

As we recount our shared childhood experiences, the story takes on a dreamlike tone. We tell our story through the characters Omar and Wesam, the use of 2D animation, and limited family photographs. With these elements we reconstruct fragments of our past, and remap our history, emphasising the subjective nature of shared memory.