Benban is a village near Aswan in southern Egypt, and I went there to film a horse race with no rules. That is genuinely all I expected: a chaotic dash across open desert, a few hours of footage, home. What I walked into was the Al Mermah festival, and I ended up staying for something a lot bigger than a race.
The horses are what you notice first. Men here spend fortunes on them, some of them worth a million pounds, and they race in open desert for no prize money at all. Nothing is won except honour for your village. I have filmed a lot of things people do for money, so it took me a while to stop looking for the catch.
Then I got pulled off the street, which is how Benban works. You walk past, somebody waves you in, and you are sitting in a Diwan eating with people you have never met. A Diwan is a guest house where anyone can come and be fed, and the Al Ja'afra tribe kept doing this to me for days. I met men who could name thirteen generations of their own bloodline without stopping to think. I watched Tahteeb, the stick fighting that goes back four and a half thousand years to the Pharaohs and is still taught to boys here.
I also got the car properly stuck in the sand, danced with Sufis at midnight, sat inside a house built entirely out of palm trees, met women running their own businesses in a place where I had assumed that would not be happening, and found out what a donkey costs.
The reunion is the part I keep thinking about. Families travel for hours to a gathering that has been going for two hundred years, and everybody there knows exactly who everyone is and how they are related to them. I went out to film a horse race and I came back with some uncomfortable questions about how the rest of us live.
Filmed in Benban, near Aswan.