Like any Egyptian woman of her age, Dina (28), eagerly awaits to get married. But she lives in Imbaba, a poor and rough district of Cairo suffering from unemployment and a drugs trade. Suitors change their mind once they find out where she lives. Whereas Dina, a managing editor in a news agency and a PhD student, refuses to marry a man from her neighborhood. She doesn’t find them up to her standards.

Dina’s family and social environment start putting pressure on her to marry. Out of desperation, she accepts the proposal of a 45 year-old businessman. But the groom’s mother refuses the engagement: she suspects Dina might have had relations with men before.
Being at a loss, Dina anonymously writes to a reader’s column in a newspaper, describing her problems. Later on Dina gets engaged to Salah, a trustable man she meets on an Islamic marriage website. Unexpectedly, Dina’s letter to the newspaper gets published and her life is turned upside down. She starts receiving marriage proposals from engineers, doctors and professors who admire her frankness.

Dina breaks off her engagement to Salah and sets up an appointment with one of the men who proposed to her – not knowing whether or not he will come to Imbaba.

In 2007, as a student, I moved to Cairo. After searching for an apartment for a long time, I settled in a district located in the heart of the capital, close to the university where the rents were relatively low. That was Imbaba: a poor and repellent quarter of Cairo, sheltering hawkers, homeless people and criminals; an area long forgotten by the government.

I discovered that most of Imbaba’s inhabitants claimed to live in one of the luxurious districts nearby, separated from Imbaba only by a pedestrian bridge built over the train tracks. Imbaba had fallen into oblivion due to the government’s negligence, which led to the spread of bullying, drug trade and poverty. I avoided inviting friends over for fear of them misjudging me once they knew where I really lived.
Three years ago, I read a message sent to the Al-Ahram newspaper’s weekly column, which discussed social problems of anonymous writers. A woman living in Imbaba wrote that the name of the district carried a social stigma and made her a less desirable potential wife for men from outside Imbaba. Moreover, the district was going from bad to worse, compared to when her family first moved there. Her father considered selling their house and to relocate in order to increase his daughter’s chances of getting married; an idea she rejected, but her father kept insisting. The woman was wondering what else she could do.

I remembered the feelings I had when living in Imbaba. The woman’s case seemed complicated because her education and career made her part of Egypt’s modern society but she still had to live in Imbaba.
To me, all this perfectly reflected Egypt’s “fake society”, which is only interested in appearance and deception instead of honesty and personal qualities as a result of the last four decades of corruption, ignorance and economic liberalization.

This woman seemed somehow trapped to me. I asked myself if she would be able to evolve within the society surrounding her that insisted on a traditional concept of life. And: What kind of ideals could she believe in then? Would she become part of the “fake society”, or would she decide to live differently than the people around her? And finally: What would this woman be willing to do to find “the right” husband?