Film Screening | Lift Like a Girl

When

Monday May 1, 2023: 6:00pm to 7:30pm  Add to Calendar /   Add to Google Calendar

Where

Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

Description

Lift Like a Girl is a feature documentary by Mayye Zayed and a coming-of-age story about Zebiba, an Egyptian girl dreaming to become a world-champion weightlifter.

On a busy, noisy high-traffic street corner in Alexandria, Egypt, a seemingly vacant corner lot surrounded by chain link fencing is the training site of Egypt’s most elite champions: female weightlifters. Zebiba (Arabic for “raisin”) has been training at the site for five years, since she was 9, following in the footsteps of Egypt’s most famous athletes of all time—including the first Arab, female, two-time Olympic medalist weightlifter Abeer Abdel Rahman, and World champion and Olympic athlete Nahla Ramadan.

Nahla’s father, the visionary Captain Ramadan, has bred champions, female champions, from his makeshift corner-lot training site for over two decades—4 Olympic, 9 World and 17 Pan African champions. Now it's Zebiba’s turn. But can Zebiba put aside her youthful instincts and direct her focus to become the weightlifting champion the Captain is sure she is? Proving there is nothing that women can't do, the film observes the traditional gender dynamics that come into play with the male-dominated sport of weightlifting.

This 92-minute documentary is unrated.