First the Blush then The Habit, A Cairo Film Festival short.

First the Blush then the Habit, directed by Mariam Al Ferjani, is a 15-minute short that treats history as contamination. The film follows Layla, a Tunisian immigrant in Italy who discovers she has become a vampire—an immortal, wandering figure whose hunger and alienation embody a very real immigrant condition. She meets Ettore, an Italian vampire whose existence predates hers by a century. Their encounter is a confrontation between two forms of displacement.

All Images are courtesy of Mariam Al Ferjani

Set between Milan’s hidden churches, industrial outskirts, and autumn forests, the film stages a historical inversion with real Mediterranean weight. In the late 19ᵉ and early 20ᵉ centuries, Italy was exporting its poor: tens of thousands of Sicilians crossed the sea to settle in Tunisia, forming what became the largest European community in the country. By 1926, more than 89,000 Italians lived in Tunisia, building neighborhoods like La Goulette—nicknamed Little Sicily—with their own schools, banks, newspapers, and cultural institutions.

That past, largely absent from mainstream European memory, becomes the hidden architecture of the film. The route Italians once took toward Tunisian shores is now reversed: today Tunisians confront Italian bureaucratic hostility, navigating a system that treats them with the same fear, surveillance, and dispossession once projected onto Mediterranean migrants a century earlier.

This question of how time circulates is embedded in Al Ferjani’s images. As she put it :

“Faces outlive time. I filmed them like I filmed water or darkness — without controlling, only letting them surprise me.”

Her approach produces a temporality that feels dislocated, a cinema closer to Deleuzian time-image than classical narration. Layla’s face becomes what Deleuze calls a “crystal of time”: a surface where past and present coexist without hierarchy.

Al Ferjani does not cite this history directly, but the film is built on its absence. The direction of movement has reversed: Tunisians now face the same country whose citizens once fled economic precarity for North Africa. The migration that once meant survival is now met with suspicion, paperwork, refusals. Watching Layla navigate Italy’s hostility is watching a historical cycle quietly snap back.

This is the film’s underlying architecture: the supernatural becomes a method of restoring what bureaucracies erase, a way of forcing into visibility the past Europe refuses to recognise.

What struck me most is how the film handles time as a pressure system. Al Ferjani told me she films faces the way she films water: “I didn’t care about controlling them as much as I cared about being surprised”. And that’s exactly what happens to Layla’s face in the forest, in that long, fixed shot—greenery under autumn light, her body arranged with the stillness that feels both ancient and freshly wounded. It pulled another text out of my childhood: Rimbaud’s Le dormeur du val.

Growing up, I never believed the poem’s soldier. He was the kind of body France loves: young, noble, beautiful in death. A corpse turned patriotic emblem. I could never find a face that matched the poem—never found someone whose stillness felt politically charged rather than aesthetic.
Then Layla appeared.

Not dead, but occupying the same dangerous threshold the poem pretends not to see: the moment where violence meets beauty. I realized the soldier I’d been searching for was never a boy in a French riverbank. It was a blue-eyeshadowed woman lying in Italian grass, asking questions official narratives avoid. In her, the poem finally revealed what it had censored.

That stillness carries over into the film’s long shots. Al Ferjani said she used fixed frames because they imply “an invisible enemy”—a threat you feel but never see. In a world where violence in Gaza, El Fasher, Sweida is streamed live, the unseen enemy is not metaphor. The shots become a form of indictment: duration as pressure and exposure.

And then, at the end, Layla looks directly at the camera. During the pandemic, when Al Ferjani rewrote the script, she became obsessed with how people lost eye contact, replaced connection with screen-mediated dissociation. So the film ends on an uncompromising stare—an invitation to reconnect in a time when we barely inhabit our bodies. It’s not a plea and not an accusation. It’s simply a refusal to drift.

What gives this presence its weight is the film’s relationship to history. Al Ferjani rejects the idea that “accuracy” protects us from repetition. She told me, almost with resignation: 

“Did knowing about the armenian genocide statistics or the holocaust number of victims stopped the people from repeating the same mistake? No it did not.”

Empathy, imagination, and ambiguity are forces statistics cannot produce. The supernatural becomes an ethical tool: the vampire is not a gothic creature, but a migrant who must navigate hunger, alienation, and visibility without safety.

Layla and Ettore wander through Milan like displaced flâneurs—Baudelairean figures stripped of urban belonging, forced into nocturnality not by myth but by necessity. Their immortality feels less like fantasy than like the condition of anyone whose displacement never resolves, whose life becomes an archive of past and future violence. Their intimacy, too, is shaped by this. Al Ferjani told me:

The supernatural is extremely rich in suggestions, when it dares to be beyond performative.

Between the characters, tenderness and brutality coexist. I recognized in that dynamic the relationships many immigrants form: love shaped by shared strangeness, care that emerges through wounds rather than despite them.

And the strangeness extends beyond migration. Al Ferjani described feeling foreign even in her own land, or in rooms filled with glowing screens, or in hallways where a smell triggers displacement. Her words reminded me that diaspora is no longer a category—it is a contemporary condition. We are all estranged from something: our histories, our bodies, our languages, our futures. The film just makes the condition visible.

Its soundscape—silences that expand like fog, noises that appear like memory—reinforces this temporal dilation. Time doesn’t pass; it thickens. The film moves like a vision you wake from without knowing if seconds or years have slipped by. It feels autobiographical on a level Al Ferjani never states outright: her own experience of being told, twice, to leave Italy, her permit denied with absurd explanations. The violence of bureaucracy transformed into artistic method. Instead of fighting through courts, she builds a cinematic space where injustice is metabolized and reshaped outside of administrations.

The churches she films, with their cement-painted walls and dusty grey figures, echo religious art from many eras—Upanishadic drawings, Islamic iconography, Carthaginian mosaics. She doesn’t reference them consciously; she simply follows intuition. But the effect is intertextual: the film becomes a soft collision between myth, migration, religion, and poetry. Layla’s very name—meaning “night” in Arabic—grounds the story in continuity and gathering.

By the end, I returned to the image that began this whole process: a body lying in the grass. Rimbaud’s soldier, reconfigured. A figure refusing martyrdom. A woman who wakes up and looks back, disturbing the viewer’s sense of safety.

Maybe the war began long before either of us were born.
and all we do is blush, then make a habit of the wound.