Marking the first Egyptian film to participate within the International Critics' Week at Cannes Film Festival, Lagoonie Film Production’s Feathers, by Egyptian director Omar El Zohairy, has won the Grand Prize. Moreover, the film has received the FIRPESCI award for the best first feature in Cannes’s parallel sections.

Following the wins, El Gouna Film Festival has announced that Feathers will participate in the Feature Narrative Competition of its upcoming fifth edition, where the film will land its Arab world premiere.

Feathers creates a fantasy world of indefinite place and time following a passive mother who dedicates her life to her husband and children. Stuck in daily, repetitive, mundane chores, she has made herself as little as she possibly could. When a magic trick goes wrong at her 4-year-old son's birthday party, an avalanche of coincidental absurdities befalls the family. The magician turns her husband, the authoritarian father, into a chicken! The mother is now forced to come to the fore and take care of the family while moving heaven and earth to bring her husband back. As she tries to survive, she goes through a rough and absurd transformation.

Marking his feature debut, Omar El Zohairy co-wrote Feathers with Screenwriter Ahmed Amer. The film is produced by the French producers Juliette Lepoutre and Pierre Menahem (Still Moving), co-produced by Mohamed Hefzy (Film Clinic), Shahinaz El Akkad (Lagoonie Film Production), Derk-Jan Warrink and Koji Nelissen (Kepler Film) and Giorgos Karnavas and Konstantinos Kontovrakis (Heretic)and Verona Meier. MENA region distribution rights are handled by Film Clinic Indie Distribution.

The film was developed with the support of the Baumi Award, Torino Film Lab and Cinéfondation and received a Post-production Award at the Atlas Workshop of the Marrakech International Film Festival and the Dutch post production award .

Omar El Zohairy studied at the Cairo Cinema Institute and worked as an assistant director alongside some of Egypt’s most prominent directors, including Yousry Nasrallah and Youssef Chahine. His first short film Breathe Out won the Jury Special Mention Prize at the Dubai International Film Festival. In 2014, his second short The Aftermath of The Inauguration of The Public Toilet at Kilometer 375 was the first Egyptian film to be selected for the Cannes Cinefondation at the Cannes Film Festival. The film Feathers is El Zohairy’s first feature film.