She rejects grief as a reaction to loss. Instead confronting her misery face on and pushing herself to the brink, clinging to a flood of magic she experienced as a child as it flows across time from person to person and story to story.
About Her is the story of a woman who experiences the different mental stages of paincaused by the loss of her beloved husband. How she expresses and endures this pain, howshe becomes a free women in a society that has the ability to destroy unconventionalpeople, is also somehow magical.Durriya is a woman in her twenties in the 1930's Alexandria, Egypt. She loses her belovedhusband, Abbas, in a murder and is overcome with sorrow. Durriya and her husband hadbeen connected by a special bond; they both shared the same passion to break-free and flyforth.Her younger brother, Fahmy, strives to rescue Durriya from her dark sorrow; he tries toconvince her it is misplaced by exposing the other side of Abbas who was involved intorturing the youth who struggled to end colonial occupation. This pushes Durriya into asinkhole of tragedy. Isolating herself, she spirals through manic states as the flow of magicfills her house, turned into a visual representation of her active state of mind, combiningmagic, sensuality, and spirituality. It is this energy that Durriya's husband had sensed duringtheir intimate moments. Now it strikes at Durriya, pulling her into states of illuminatedconsciousness surpassing the bounds of rationality, and which many interpret as madness.Durriya's behavior grows compulsive and delusional. She forces her maid Fatima (adark-skinned woman in her twenties), to undertake endless cleaning and organizationtasks. At night, Durriya is left alone to her tragedy. The more she contemplates it, the moreshe loses her mind. Fatima longs to support her mistress. With her insightful instinct, sherealizes that Durriya possesses a luminous essence like that of the beings she knows frompopular tales and her belief that magic penetrates ordinary existence. Fatima is faithful toDurriya from the very start, grasping Durriya's excessive eccentricities and growingaccustomed to them.
