Summary
A soot-smudged silhouette trudges across a sepulchral snowscape, whiskers rimed with frost; the town’s only warmth emanates from a gaudy billboard that blazes like a fever-dream of ochre dunes and cobalt skies. Felix—tail twitching like a metronome of discontent—offers up four of his nine souls for a single sun-bleached breath of Egypt. The cosmos answers with a sob: inside Abdul’s rug-draped bazaar, tears bead on cedar counters as the carpet-seller confesses that his beloved has been spirited away by a lascivious sheik whose silken turban hides a heart of basalt. Without hesitation, Felix commandeers a threadbare flying carpet—its warp and weft humming with djinn-breath—utters the forbidden syllable that tastes of saffron and static, and catapults into a sky bruised violet by twilight. What follows is not a rescue but a metamorphosis: pyramids tilt like drunken teeth, sand coils into serpentine glyphs, and the cat becomes both pilgrim and plague, unraveling the sheik’s opulent mirage thread by luminous thread until the kidnapped woman steps forth no longer victim but sovereign, her laughter scattering the desert like gold dust in a sirocco.
Synopsis
Trudging through the snow in his hometown, Felix sees a billboard advertising sunny Egypt, and says that he'd give four of his nine lives to be there rather than freezing in the snow. He then hears crying coming from his friend Abdul's carpet shop, and it turns out that Abdul's girlfriend has been kidnapped by an Egyptian sheik. Felix promises to rescue her, and hops on a magic carpet Abdul has lying around the shop, says the magic word and flies off to Egypt to keep his promise.
Director
Otto Messmer
