This Oscar season, you may find yourself falling in love with an eight-year-old maid and celebrating Happy Birthday. That is the title of the coming-of-age drama film, directed and co-written by Sarah Goher in her feature directorial debut, which is Egypt’s submission for the best international feature category at the 2026 Oscars. Jamie Foxx is a producer on the movie, starring newcomer Doha Ramadan, Nelly Karim, Hanan Motawie, Sherif Salama, and Aly Sobhy.
It was co-written by Goher’s life and creative partner, Mohamed Diab. The duo previously also worked together on the Marvel series Moon Knight, starring Oscar Isaac, as well as Diab’s Clash and Bus 671. Happy Birthday was produced by Ahmed El Desouky for SkyLimit Production.
The film tells the story of Doha, the already-mentioned young maid, who works for an upper-class family and Cairo and is determined not to let anyone stop her from throwing a great birthday party for her friend, her employer’s daughter. In the process, Happy Birthday explores “issues of class, power, and belonging through the eyes of an innocent child,” as a preview for the movie on the website of the 29th edition of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF), where it starts screening on Saturday, notes.
The movie premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June, where it won the awards for best international narrative feature and best screenplay in such a feature, along with the Nora Ephron Award.
For Goher, the film came from personal experience. The Egyptian was born and raised in New York, but would spend summers with her grandmother in Cairo. “The only other kid my age in my grandma’s apartment was this little girl, and I thought she was extended family,” the filmmaker tells THR. “We would play, and she was the most fun thing for me whenever I’d go to Egypt. And then after a couple of summers, I realized she was my grandma’s maid.”
The girl one summer was no longer there, and Goher later realized that noone was talking about this because having young maids was not legal but common. “Child labor is not allowed in Egypt, but there’s this gray area where families in Egypt, if not in this generation, in a previous generation have a child around them that was in this limbo,” Goher explains. “So that became the inspiration for this film.”
She knew that casting the young lead was key. “I knew very well early on that I had to cast the girl right, or else the whole thing would fall apart, and I wanted a girl who understood the socio-economic world of the character,” Goher shares. She and the creative team used street casting, Facebook, TikTok and the like.
‘Happy Birthday’
Courtesy of PÖFF
In the end, she asked to meet 60 girls at the Cairo Opera House for about eight hours. “I wanted them all dressed the same so no one would know who was from the nice neighborhood and who was from the [poorer] neighborhood,” Goher recalls. “I had these girls dancing and singing, doing mirror exercises, breathing exercises, and improvisations around the film. And then, very quickly, when you have kids by themselves, away from their parents, and with other kids, they really open up in a way that you start to see a lot about them quickly.”
Young Doha Ramadan stood out. “She’s such a confident and creative girl,” says Goher. “She would tell me these crazy stories about herself, her friends, and about things in her neighborhood, and these scary stories that they tell each other. And I realized that the kids who are really good actors are really good storytellers.”
The two worked closely throughout the process. “I needed her to understand that this is fiction,” Goher explains. “And I wanted to have her input into her character, because I did not want to be projecting a story from my imagination about someone like her.”
The filmmaker hopes that audiences will fall in love with the character of Toha just like some of her friends who are not into children did. “They don’t want kids, but they fell in love with Doha and Toha. Neither has any sense of self-pity,” Goher tells THR. “Like the character, Doha doesn’t see the tragedy of her life. She just wants to live it like, and that’s something I think we all need to see.”
The filmmaker didn’t want to wrap the film and send Ramadan back to her own life without paying back time and effort for all the young talent’s work on the movie, so she created an “enrichment program.” After all, Ramadan didn’t know how to read when they started filming, even though she memorized the entire script, including all the other actors’ lines. “As soon as we finished shooting the film, I got her a private tutor to teach her reading and writing,” Goher tells THR. “And I also enrolled her at the Opera House, which has a gifted youth center, so she’s been taking ballet there.”
Concludes the Happy Birthday director: “I wanted her to see herself as an artist, because in her socio- economic class, art is not something that’s a priority. I needed to give her an outlet that she could continue to follow. And I’m very grateful for her mother and her family, who have been completely supportive and cooperative throughout this entire process.”
