This charming, energetic film out Egypt — shot before the recent Middle East revolutions — had its inception in the director, Ahmad Abdalla, wandering the streets of Alexandria like a tourist, when some graffiti caught his eye. A little research revealed the graffiti artist to be a 19-year-old girl, and thus was planted the seed for Abdalla to make Microphone, a film about the vibrant underground art and music scene — street art, metal bands, and hip-hop artists, skateboarders and filmmakers — in Alexandria.

Abdalla chose to tell a fictional tale based on the real stories he gathered from the art scene in Alexandria, so what we have here is, essentially, roughly fictionalized re-tellings of the stories the artists told about themselves. This lends the a sense of realism to the story of a prodigal son of a retired musician returning home to Alexandria to uncover a world he never knew existed.
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