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, 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 is Zebiba’s turn. But can Zebiba put aside her youthful instincts, and direct her focus to be the weightlifting champion the Captain is sure she is?
An Egyptian independent filmmaker and the founder of Cléo Media for female driven content production and impact distribution in Alexandria. She's a film director, producer, editor and cinematographer whose work was screened in various venues and film festivals across the world including TIFF, Berlinale, Dok Leipzig, DOC NYC, AFI Fest, Cinemed, etc. After studying Telecommunications & Electronics Engineering in Alexandria University, Mayye studied filmmaking in the Jesuits Film workshop in 2009/2010. Then she received the Fulbright scholarship and studied cinema and media studies in Wellesley College and Innovations in Documentary in MIT in 2011/2012 in the US. She is the recipient of the Getty Images ARRAY grant in 2017 and Film Independent's Global Media Makers Fellowship in 2017 and 2019. She’s also an alumna of Berlinale Talents, Mediterranean Film Institute, Documentary Campus Masterschool, DOX BOX, Good Pitch and the American Film Showcase documentary program in USC School of Cinematic Arts. In 2013, Mayye co-directed and co-produced the collaborative feature The Mice Room (Dubai FF 2013, Sao Paulo FF 2014) with 5 other filmmakers. In 2016 she made the award winning short A Stroll Down Sunflower Lane (Berlinale 2016, AFI Fest 2016, Best Experimental Film in Sharjah Film Platform 2019). In 2020, she directed and produced her debut feature documentary Lift Like a Girl (TIFF 2020, Dok Leipzig 2020, DOC NYC 2020).
