The three-minute film

In Egypt the Ramadan advertisement runs for three minutes, and everybody involved calls it a film.

The shape is fixed. An original song, written for it, sung by someone the country already loves. A family, usually three generations of one. Somebody who left and comes back. A table at the end. The brand appears in the last five seconds, and the last five seconds are often the only part that mentions it at all.

Every other month of the year the same company is fighting for six seconds before a thumb moves. In this one month it asks an audience for three minutes and is given them. That is why the genre exists, and there is no other point in the calendar, in any market I have worked in, where that trade is on offer.

The films for this year are in edit suites now, a few weeks before the month is expected to begin, cut to songs that were finished weeks ago.

Which is where I have learned to be careful, because three minutes borrowed is three minutes owed.

The debt shows up about a week after the month ends. Everybody can hum the song. Everybody can name the actor. Plenty of people are still arguing about the ending. Almost nobody can say whose film it was, and the ones who can tend to work in the industry.

That is a company having paid for a piece of national entertainment, at the price of national entertainment, and having taken a credit line nobody read.

Three minutes of a fasting family's evening is the most generous thing an audience here gives a brand all year. If the brand is a footnote on it, the audience was generous and the brand was not.