‘Big Boys Don’t Cry’ Premieres at El Gouna: Inside Muhammad Mustapha’s Cairo Bodybuilder Doc

Egyptian director Muhammad Mustapha premiered his documentary “Big Boys Don’t Cry” in the Feature Documentary Competition at Egypt’s El Gouna Film Festival — a project that took shape over nearly a decade.

The film follows a group of Cairo bodybuilders and nightclub bouncers, observing how men understand and perform masculinity. Mustapha began the project in 2016 as an anthropological and sociological study. It took roughly three years for that initial exploration to become a film.

“I’m a feminist. I’m intellectual. I find myself very drawn to this hyper-masculine performance,” Mustapha told Variety. “I should know better, right? And so this was the question: Why am I so intrigued?”

Where does the film’s emotional core come from?

Mustapha grew up in what he calls a “local” Cairo neighborhood, surrounded by its masculine codes. As a studious “nerd,” he could read as less masculine there. At dental school, the same behavior could make him appear loud or vulgar.

That contrast taught him that masculinity shifts according to context. He saw the same flexibility in his subjects.

“How they perform their masculinity on stage is different than in front of the pub, is different than when he is addressing a problem, different than when he is with his family,” he said.

One figure anchors the film: Abdallah, whom Mustapha spent a year with before cameras rolled. The director believed the film was driven by ideas. The edit proved otherwise.

“I thought there was no emotional arc in the film. It was very theme-driven, and it was very intellectual,” he recalled. “At the end, while we were editing, I discovered that the emotional core of the film is actually our friendship.”

Takeaway: a film built as an intellectual study found its heart in a personal bond.

How were the subjects involved in the filmmaking?

Mustapha rejects the idea that documentary can be purely observational. A camera inevitably changes what happens in front of it, he argues. The men became collaborators, at times proposing situations themselves.

“I wouldn’t say I made this film alone. I would say I made it with the characters. We made it together,” he said.

That collaboration extended to consent. Participants could ask for material to be removed at any point, including during the final edit.

“I earned their trust. It was not given to me,” he affirmed.

The absence of women is deliberate. Mustapha wanted to observe the men in an exclusively male environment, comparing the film to peeking into a gym locker room. Introducing women, he believed, would “change the equation.”

Takeaway: control over their own image made the subjects partners, not subjects alone.

What does Mustapha say about men and anger?

For Mustapha, the film’s questions reach beyond Egypt. Masculinity takes different forms across cultures, but he sees restrictions on men’s emotional expression as universal.

“The only emotion men are allowed to express is anger,” he argued. “Imagine how distorted the male psyche is because of all this suppression of emotions.”

Why is the El Gouna premiere a full-circle moment?

Mustapha brought the project to CineGouna, the festival’s industry arm, in 2020. The film went on to receive support from the Doha Film Institute, the Red Sea Film Fund and Germany’s Robert Bosch Foundation.

“It’s a full circle moment,” he reflected. “I’m very excited to show it to people in Egypt, though I’m slightly nervous.”

A decade of development has also shaped his view of independent cinema in Egypt and the region. He wants filmmakers to take more artistic risks and to focus on local audiences rather than international festival programmers.

“We need to work with less budget, with less financial risk, and more artistic risks,” he said. “Tell our stories to our audience.”

For regional cinema, the film stands as a test case for that argument: a low-budget, locally rooted documentary returning to the festival platform where it began.