In director Hussein Al-Manbawy's Sweet Life, based on a Spanish series and written by Injy Qassem and Asmaa Abdel-Khalek under the supervision of screenwriter Tamer Habib, a young and happy couple are preparing for their wedding, which includes a routine check-up the groom takes to be irrelevant. Amina (Hind Saby), the bride, has just been promoted; and Omar (Hani Adel), her fiancé, is putting together a romantic dinner to celebrate. “I simply want a medical report stating how fit and healthy I am,” she tells him, “so that later in life I can show you what marriage has done to me.” Ambitious and strong-willed, Amina is in her early thirties; and every aspect of her life is under control. Suddenly she gets a phone call from her uncle Adel (Mustafa Fahmi), an oncologist at the hospital where she carried out her tests who has not been in touch with her family for years. As it turns out Amina has leukaemia that requires long treatment including the nightmare of chemotherapy. Unable to confront her family, Amina visits her father's grave to confide in the dead man – only to discover that she has a half-sister she never new about, Shahd (Noha Abdin), who is also her chance of a cure. The sequence of confrontations is a master scene performed perfectly by all the actors. Amina starts with her life-long friend and neighbour Sara (Hanan Mutawie), who bursts out crying in disbelief. In their turn the family, Amina's mum Nadia (Anouchka), her grandmother Zuzu (Ragaa Al-Geddawi) and her younger sister Alia (Salma Abou-Deif), show limitless understanding and support. It is her fiancé Omar who, showing that peculiar human weakness of being unable to deal with his partner's predicament, begins to pick on her and play the victim, evidently provoking her into a breakup rather than breaking up with her. Amina finds an alternative haven of love and support in the cancer patients' community she joins, where she can share her concerns without fear of judgement and where she learns to cope with the changes illness has brought to her life. There she meets Heba (played by the late actor Abdalla Gheith's granddaughter Yasmine Gheith, a fashion designer who, on being diagnosed with breast cancer, has shared her battle on the media in real life), an optimist and a force for good who teaches Amina how to compensate for her loss of hair. It is through Heba that Amina meets Selim, played by Dhaffer L'Abidine, another Tunisian: a successful businessman who is suffering from a brain tumour who nonetheless refuses to have surgery, his only hope of survival, because it would affect his motor skills, possibly paralysing him. Unlike Amina, Selim has shared his illness with no one except his housekeeper Haneya (Afaf Mustafa), who raised him after his mum passed away; even his father doesn't know. He is not emotional about his cancer, but he oozes positive energy and he teaches Amina to give up wanting to control life. “While dying is not a decision,” he tells her, “living is.” Despite an initial clash, as time goes by Selim and Amina become best friends; failed by Omar, she feels she has found in Selim all that she could hope for and more.
