In a new episode of the Avant-titre video essays on cinematic culture and the art of filmmaking, Ahmed Abo El Fadl takes us on a journey into personal cinema. From the projection point of Kawthar Younis’s commercially successful graduation project, the documentary A Present from the Past (2015), we touch on various independent Egyptian documentaries in which directors have turned the camera towards their own lives, and explore what made Younis’s film particularly successful with audiences.