In 2017, actor Mahmoud Hemida was a dear guest on the El Assima show, presented by Lamis El Hadidy, in a special episode about the film “Photocopy”. Lamis El Hadidy introduced him by expressing how pleased she was to host the great actor Mahmoud Hemida, the star of Photocopy, with Shereen Reda, who played the role of an old lady. This film won the Best Film Award at El Gouna Film Festival, and Lamis El Hadidy stated that Mahmoud Hemida is a master in seemingly easy but rather daunting acting. One of the topics of conversation was about life in general, the details of the film, and whether or not new technologies has turned us into clones.

Hemida: I don’t know which film is the closest to my heart, and every film has its own place. I don’t do anything unless I love it first, so that I can be faithful to it, and if I don’t like it, I won’t do it.

Hemida: I love how I turned out, because I have no other choice.

Hemida: I am not anxious about time, nor worried about white hair.

Hemida: Sure, there are similarities between Mahmoud Hemida and Mahmoud in a Photocopy, because we were brought up in the arms of the one party that is the Socialist Union, and they used to teach us about things like purposeful art and non-purposeful art, and I discovered that was all empty words, because in my opinion our fellows in the film industry are not teachers, they may teach others but they shouldn’t claim they can teach the audience.

Hemida: We offer works of entertainment, my goal is to entertain the audience, the crowd who took me in and embraced me, and in return I am eternally grateful to it. I am also ignorant to what the audience learn from films.

Hemida: Sure, I always look for value in work, but I don’t claim having it.

Hemida: The audience is the owner of the last word, even if the taste changes. Poets are supposed to be the most intelligent. So if one of them feels entitled to condemn the audience and say it has poor taste, they are not smart after all. Calling the audience that is not smart at all.

Hemida: At the time of contracting films in the early nineties, I was an exception and I would go from one film to another in a blink of an eye. That was because I was just lucky, not out of cleverness. When I was making many films, I felt like some of them were trivial, so I didn’t watch those films. Then I would meet one of my viewers and tell me about one of those films or a particular scene and I would recall it. I did not watch them out of ignorance and because I was influenced by the opinions of others, but I would remember what the audience commented on.. So I cherish all the films I made.

Hemida: Baheb El Cima is a great film.

Hemida: We are in an extremist society, and fundamentalism is ingrained in us all. That is how we were raised, so if any terrorist act occurs, we can ignore it and not condemn or resist it. This means that we are fundamentalists and we claim otherwise. We should pay attention and criticize ourselves because we are not used to that.

Hemida: I welcome criticism.. and I take it seriously.

Hemida: I never entered into a discussion with a critic, and once I discussed this with Tarek El Shinnawi about why I did not speak to him when he wrote an article about me. I told him: Because my response to your article will be in my next work, God willing.

Hemida: What I liked about Photocopy was that the filmmaker was an architect who was trying to show the distortion that happened in the city through El Abbasia neighborhood and the people who were present at the time by featuring a person who was working for a newspaper and had no family then retired and opened a photography studio. Through this project, he started to take us through that distortion.

Hemida: In Photocopy, we tackle the deformation.

Hemida: I am against people making themselves guardians of others.

Hemida: I cherish life, of course.

Hemida: Marriage is originally a single company and it has no references at all, and all advice about marriage is futile.

Hemida: Limiting marriage to the process of sexual intercourse and immunizing the soul from fornication, deems its first purpose sexual, even though it is a spiritual partnership.

Hemida: We see couples gracefully leading a content life. They seem alike because their souls have unified to a degree where they become a reflection of one another.

Hemida: I do not advise.. We advise because we do not reveal our deepest thoughts.

Hemida: I can love when I am old.

Hemida: I love everything about women, because who is a woman: she is the one who carried me and contained me in her womb, gave birth to me, then breastfed me, and raised me, then I fell in love with her, married her, and gave birth together, so she is everything to me.

Hemida: I do not think I can live without a woman in my life.

Hemida: I used to not help out at home because we were all brought up wrong, but now I can wash the dishes.

Hemida: I used to be a dictator at home, then I changed with life. When I had children, I immediately changed.

Hemida: My worst flaws are short temper and ignorance.

Hemida: Whenever one learns something, one knows that he has been ignorant and remains as such.

Hemida: I assess, but I don’t make judgments.

Hemida: What worries me most about cinema is that no law has been issued for this industry yet.. A law is required to regulate the industry. The law will set job descriptions, specify their responsibilities, and the rights arising from them, but nowadays everything about this industry is random.

Hemida: The industry has long been under the authority of a ministry.