Julia Mazza

“When I studied at NYU, when I went to NYU film, the first thing they tell you is the hardest thing in film is animals and children,” director Sarah Goher told the audience at a screening of her debut feature Happy Birthday at the IFC Center.

However, being a mother herself helped her overcome this particular challenge.

“As someone who has two children, I’m very grateful I had those two children before I made this film because it just taught me so much about kids,” she said. “Like, if you really prepare kids and you really earn their trust and you really prepare them for what’s to come, they won’t just give you a hundred percent, they could give you a hundred and fifty percent.”

Happy Birthday, Egypt’s nomination for the 98th Academy Awards in 2026, follows eight-year-old Toha, a child maid for a wealthy Cairo family who forms a special bond with her employer’s daughter, Nelly. Having never celebrated her own birthday, Toha becomes determined to ensure Nelly has a perfect party, secretly hoping to experience the joy she’s never known. As Toha’s relationship with Nelly’s mother, Laila, begins to transcend typical employer-servant boundaries, deep-rooted social hierarchies are threatened, forcing the young girl to confront the realities of class division in modern Egypt.

These realities, however, are communicated in the film through soft whispers.

“At some point, two European sales companies, low-key suggested I add more violence to the film,” Goher explained, “I think they were expecting kind of like Parasite, perhaps I would have something that was much more of a ‘big bang,’ a message about class and about division. And I didn’t for two reasons.” 

“I didn’t feel that was true to the reality,” she continued, ”I think there’s a lot more nuance to the reality of these situations. And I feel that at the end of the day, I also want to make a film that I’m not trying to get into a European festival, I’m not trying to sell this to the West.”

“I want a film that when I show this to people in my family, to friends who think that this is okay or who don’t want to acknowledge that there’s something wrong with this kind of situation, the invisibility of certain people in society, that it actually gets to them.”

As it turns out, despite the best efforts of child labor laws, this story resonates with audiences around the world. Happy Birthday is very much a film that pushes back against the notion of giving kids a “better life” via servitude in higher class communities.

“I’ve shown this film to lots of audiences. I get people from India, Honduras, Latin America, Mexico, um, even in Spain, which surprised me. This situation happens,” Goher shared with the audience. “Now, by law, child labor is forbidden in Egypt. But there are kids who exist in this [invisible] limbo under the false pretense of goodwill.”

Still, it was important to Goher that Doha Ramadan (Toha), who the director discovered on the streets of Cairo, didn’t just see her character as a servant.

“The other thing is, when I was directing her, I never told her you’re playing a maid because I didn’t want her to project that,” she explained. “I felt like her prerogative was if I’m this little girl, and this is what I saw with the actual girl who inspired the character, she wants to see herself as a child first.”

“And she would come up with suggestions and be like, ‘Sarah, what if I blah blah blah blah blah,’ or ‘why don’t we blah blah blah blah blah?’ And I would let her do what she felt curious about because I started to find myself like while I was shooting the film, it doesn’t matter what, you know, all the kind of ambitious directing stuff you want to do.”

Since wrapping Happy Birthday, Goher also shared how she stays in touch with Ramadan.

“I didn’t want to be one of those filmmakers who plucks a kid out of obscurity, puts them in front of the camera, and then forgets about them,” Goher shared, “And I’ve seen this happen, and it’s very unfortunate. I’ve been to her school, she does go to a school, it’s not a good school. So I got her a private tutor who, since June of 2024, until now, he teaches her three times a week, and now she can read and write really well.”

“There’s not a lot of outreach for the arts in these communities, so I enrolled her at Cairo Opera House’s Youth Talent Center. So she was doing music, and she hated the singing part, so she’s just doing ballet. So she’s been doing that since June of 2024.”

Happy Birthday, which received several honors at the Tribeca Festival, is Egypt’s submission for the 98th Academy Awards for Best International Feature Film.