‘Mixed Racer’ - Review

For a lot of upcoming filmmakers, their first projects are dedicated to highlighting their personal journeys and musings, creating a raw and truthful cinematic experience that easily translates to the crowd. In the 2023 documentary short Mixed Racer, Egyptian-Swiss filmmaker Jonah Atalla draws from his experience of coming from both Egyptian and European backgrounds, and experiments with concepts like identity, race and ethnicity. Premiering for the first time in the Middle East and North Africa in the 10th edition of the Alexandria Short Film Festival, Mixed Racer utilises Atalla’s distinct vibrant style of illustrations and animations against a backdrop of shots similar to a video game design to convey its message.

The main characters are anonymous, dressed in full biker attire, inviting you to play along. A blank canvas that any diaspora kid can project himself onto. In a stream of scenes with upbeat electronic music, we see the characters go about their daily lives, driven by the urge to fit in somewhere, constantly in search of home. In one scene, a bar appears on screen to analyse if the characters are ‘white passing’ enough. The sounds playing in the background are just as expressive as the vivid animations, while the call for prayer is heard, you grasp the feelings of Cairo's streets at dusk. Techno music and siren sounds fill the streets in another scene and Atalla credits it to the everyday sounds of a European city. Our characters continue to navigate this state of being in the ‘in-between’, with a line that lingered with me ‘I only feel like home on the plane’. Being an Egyptian not born in my homeland myself, it felt almost freeing seeing these characters wander adrift, a state that portrays young people who feel like they don't belong anywhere concrete. Mixed Racer is a playful refreshing analysis that lends its 9 minutes runtime to some of the overlooked inner gnawings of being part of the diaspora, a topic that many of us long to see presented more on screen.