Stanza is a feature film set in Cairo and Mississauga, scheduled to start production in May 2026.
The film follows Youhanna, a young Egyptian architect living abroad, who returns to Cairo for the first time in ten years. His attempt to reconnect with his roots while researching Coptic architecture leads him to confront how much both he and his home country have changed since he left. What begins as a research trip becomes a more personal reckoning with memory, distance, and the passage of time, as familiar places appear unfamiliar after years abroad.
The story will resonate with many who have lived between Egypt and the diaspora — the experience of returning to a place that is at once known and unknown, and of measuring change both in oneself and in the landscapes that once shaped everyday life. Like Marco Adly’s earlier film Mama, which Egypt Migrations previously premiered, Stanza explores migration by attending to ordinary encounters and to the spaces where memory and reality meet. The film moves between Cairo and Mississauga, tracing the connections that link diasporic life to the places migrants leave and return to over time.
Youhanna’s journey takes him through the dense fabric of Old Cairo and outward into the open desert beyond the city. As an architect, he studies the layers of Cairo’s built environment and reflects on the transformations that have reshaped the city over the past century. Streets, buildings, and neighbourhoods become points of reflection through which questions of continuity and change come into focus. His movement through the city mirrors the experience of many migrants choosing return, who encounter familiar places through the distance created by migration.
The film will be shot in locations familiar to many Copts but rarely represented in global arthouse cinema, including the fourth-century Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus in Old Cairo and the Monastery of Saint Anthony in the Red Sea mountains. These sites remain active centers of worship and pilgrimage while also standing as some of the oldest surviving monuments of Christian Egypt. Their presence in the film situates Youhanna’s search within a longer historical landscape that marks religious life and cultural continuity.
Stanza is being produced by filmmaker Marco Adly, who is completing his graduate studies at New York University. The project continues themes he began exploring in his earlier short film Mama, which examined family memory and migration across generations, and Stanza extends these concerns into a longer narrative centred on return and rediscovery.
The production is currently raising funds ahead of its planned shoot in Cairo in May 2026. The campaign will support location filming and production costs for a project that seeks to bring rarely depicted Egyptian and Coptic spaces to the screen. Those interested in supporting the project or learning more can visit the campaign here:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-us-make-stanza-an-egyptiancanadian-feature-film
As a Canadian nonprofit founded on the belief that education, historical memory, and a shared vision can empower Egyptians everywhere, Egypt Migrations is proud to turn stories into action and support the cultural productions of aspiring filmmakers across our many global diasporas.
Marco Adly is a first-generation Coptic immigrant and a filmmaker currently living between New York, Mississauga, and Cairo.
Egypt Migrations 