CAIRO, 1980. Musa is a brilliant Egyptian professor. But he cannot move past the grief of losing his only son, Yusuf, an officer who died fighting the Israelis in the 1956 War. These ghosts of the past have fuelled his recent research into doing the impossible - finding a way to travel in time and save his son from ever dying. He has been working on a method to ‘leap back’ to the past, by switching places with someone else from that time.

He succeeds and wakes up in the war, but unexpectedly, in the body of an Israeli soldier - Ben. It is as if Musa has woken up in a nightmare. While he roams the Sinai desert in Ben’s body looking for his son, Ben is taking over Musa’s life in Cairo. Each time Musa returns to the present, he discovers the changes Ben has been making to his life. More and more as Musa leaps back and forth in time, he increasingly loses grip of his own identity. Does he stay and reclaim his life or does he complete his mission?

He decides to make the ultimate sacrifice and go back for Yusuf before it’s too late. But as he nears Yusuf’s unit, he is mistaken for an Israeli and killed. Moments later, Yusuf finds Ben/Musa’s body and buries him, unaware that this man is actually his father.

This story is inspired by loss in my own family. During the ‘56 War, my grandfather received news that his favorite son, an Egyptian army officer, had been killed in the Sinai by the Israeli army. Upon hearing this, he was stricken with grief and suffered a stroke. He eventually recovered but people say he was never quite the same - the sorrow he felt was so intense it was as if he had lost a part of himself out in that desert. It was a sorrow that would also send him to an early grave at the age of 50. Because they both died so young, I never met either of these men and so it was up to my mother to tell me their tragic story. As a child I tried to picture them, I tried to imagine a love so deep between two human beings that it could turn into something tragic. I tried to picture a man that could be destroyed by his own grief.
I Dreamt of Empire is a story about a father who has lost his beloved son, but here he has the unique opportunity to do something about it. He invents a way to travel back in time to stop his son from dying in the first place. But as he journeys back and forth to alter time, his simple plan is complicated by another man, a kind of double, taking over his present life.

While the film fits in the sci-fi genre, it has little to do with futuristic technology and more to do with human memory, nostalgia and identity. I find these three facets of a person most fascinating and they inform all of my writing. It is by exploring these elements as a storyteller that I am able to resolve my own fragmented past. Here, we have a main character that finds a fantastical way to repair his own past, to literally go back to his son and save him. But the price he pays for rewriting history is that he must go deeper and deeper into a nightmare and lose hold of his own identity.

Empire intentionally starts off with two natural enemies pitted against one another and could easily become a grand political allegory. But as the story continues we learn Musa’s greatest adversary is not his Israeli double, it’s himself. This film is ultimately about a man coming to terms with what he lost, a man learning to no longer be a victim of his own grief and past.

As a child, as much as I tried to picture my grandfather and his pain, he was always a blur, a shadow of a man. Writing this story has been a way to try to understand him and how love can lead a father to sacrifice everything, even himself.