Oscar winner Jamie Foxx is a producer on the movie, starring newcomer Doha Ramadan, Nelly Karim, Hanan Motawie, Sherif Salama, Aly Sobhy.

It was co-written by Goher’s life and creative partner, Mohamed Diab.

The duo previously also worked on the Marvel series Moon Knight, starring Oscar Isaac, as well as Diab’s Clash and Bus 671.

The movie premiered at the Tribeca Film Fest in June, where it won best international narrative feature and best screenplay, along with the Nora Ephron Award.

The girl one summer was no longer there, and Goher later realized that noone was talking about this because having young maids was not legal but common. “Child labor is not allowed in Egypt, but there’s this gray area where families in Egypt, if not in this generation, in a previous generation have a child around them that was in this limbo,” Goher explains. “So that became the inspiration for this film.”

In the end, she asked to meet 60 girls at the Cairo Opera House for about eight hours. “I wanted them all dressed the same so no one would know who was from the nice neighborhood and who was from the [poorer] neighborhood,” Goher recalls. “I had these girls dancing and singing, doing mirror exercises, breathing exercises, and improvisations around the film. And then, very quickly, when you have kids by themselves, away from their parents, and with other kids, they really open up in a way that you start to see a lot about them quickly.”

Young Doha Ramadan stood out. “She’s such a confident and creative girl,” says Goher. “She would tell me these crazy stories about herself, her friends, and about things in her neighborhood, and these scary stories that they tell each other. And I realized that the kids who are really good actors are really good storytellers.”

The two worked closely throughout the process. “I needed her to understand that this is fiction,” Goher explains. “And I wanted to have her input into her character, because I did not want to be projecting a story from my imagination about someone like her.”

The filmmaker didn’t want to wrap the film and send Ramadan back to her own life without paying back time and effort for all the young talent’s work on the movie, so she created an “enrichment program.” After all, Ramadan didn’t know how to read when they started filming, even though she memorized the entire script, including all the other actors’ lines. “As soon as we finished shooting the film, I got her a private tutor to teach her reading and writing,” Goher tells THR. “And I also enrolled her at the Opera House, which has a gifted youth center, so she’s been taking ballet there.”