Dr. Atef, the director of a rural health unit in Egypt, enters the unit's dental clinic and asks to see the clinic's patient record. The nurse in charge escorts him to the dentist's room, who asks her and a patient at the clinic to leave before inviting the director to sit in the patients' chair under the pretext of examining him. The dentist surprises the director by forcibly tying his wrists in the chair and placing a mouth opener between his teeth to prevent him from speaking, and threatens him with woe and perseverance if he tries to approach the dental clinic in the unit, nursing department, nurses or pharmacy, until his service period ends in the place in the drama "Balto" directed by Omar Al-Mohandes, production 2023.
The series consists of 10 episodes and has caused a huge social and artistic noise that is not commensurate with the degree of fame of the actors or their material production capabilities. The reason is that he presented an unfamiliar realistic dramatic vision in a satirical form about the conditions of doctors in Egypt as well as the health and social conditions in the villages in a way that captured the attention of viewers a few days before the start of the Ramadan drama season. This will put many Ramadan series in a difficult comparison position.
The irony is that the series is the first experience in the script of the young doctor Ahmed Atef Fayyad, quoting his satirical book "Balto, Flannel and Tab", in which he narrates paradoxes and contradictions between what people imagine about the social and professional status of doctors in Egypt and the reality of the matter on the ground by narrating his own experience. In his book, he recounts his journey after completing his medical studies in the central Delta city of Tanta, the period of compulsory service that doctors must work in Egypt, and how his share was to work in a remote village north of the Delta. It is a book that indirectly details the Egyptian medical community's talk about the difficulty of practicing the profession in the country and the lack of resources, before it turned into a phenomenon of mass professional migration that has recently become the talk of local and international media.
The series is full of funny situations that are light and deep in meaning, representing a conflict between a young doctor who came to train and found himself the director of an entire health unit due to the sudden death of the director, and the staff in the unit, including nurses, administrators and patients.
Over time, the viewer discovers that all parties to this conflict are in fact victims and pay the price for a sin they did not commit due to the lack of material resources and the lack of human resources. The series also paints a closer picture of the reality of the Egyptian village, its development problems, the social and human relations between its members, and the difficulty of adapting a young doctor who came from the capital Cairo to the customs and traditions of the villagers.
The drama of the Egyptian village - old and new
The book and series represent a cry of literature and new realistic creativity that highlights the gap that separates much of modern drama production from the reality of people and their real problems. Realism here is not meant to reproduce, report or talk directly about reality, but to transform its material into a creative work that the viewer can easily link with real reality.
In other words, it is to quote the essence of the variables of reality and re-engineer it aesthetically. The young doctor Ahmed Atef Fayyad here follows in the footsteps of pioneers of European realism such as Charles Dickens in England and Emile Zola in France. The similarity here does not include literary language or narrative aesthetics, as his book was unfortunately written in colloquial language in a way that can provoke laughter from those accustomed to reading lengthy Facebook posts, but it is far from the aesthetics of literature. What is meant is his ability to transform the suffering of a public and profound figure into a readable and visual comedy text.
Fayyad, director Omar al-Muhandis and a number of young protagonists represent the model of Generation Z (Z), born in the mid-nineties until the first decade of the 21st century. It is a generation described as technologically connected to the world and physically detached from its local communities. He also has a lot of information, lacks a lot of skills, and suffers from anxiety and depression. The series embodied the sum of these paradoxes at the level of practice of the profession and human relations between colleagues and villagers. The young doctor's visit to the village was as if he were visiting another world and not a place just a few hours away from his city, illustrating the demographic and class gap that the people of Cairo and most major Egyptian cities live in about the reality of life in the countryside, which constitutes the vast majority of the country's geography and population.
Previous generations have embodied this ambiguous relationship between the people of Cairo and the major cities on the one hand and the countryside on the other in novels and works of film and television in the past. But the comparison was limited to some service and administrative problems in the novel "Diary of a Deputy in the Countryside" in 1937 by the writer Tawfiq al-Hakim about the story of a prosecutor in the judiciary who was appointed to a village, which turned into a movie and a series after that. This relationship came to materialize as a safe haven for the residents of Cairo from the crowds of the capital and the drying up of social relations in the film "He came out and did not return" in 1984 directed by Mohamed Khan, when the film's protagonist, actor Yahya Al-Fakharany, went to his village to spend an interest for one day, so he decided to stay there to escape his problems in Cairo.
As for the series "Balto", we are facing a stable reality in the village that tries to adapt to the limited capabilities and does not accept the newcomer from Cairo, who brought him "theoretical" things, as described by the dentist in the unit. Also, this expatriate wants to return to Cairo as soon as possible, and only the senior government administration is forced to stay together, so that the doctor adapts little by little to the reality of the village. And the series ended in such a way that it is not possible to know what happened to the young man next. It is a semi-open ending that whetted the appetite of viewers for a second part that the author did not promise, but said that if it happened, it would be of the same quality as the first level.