To celebrate the timelessness of great storytelling, we reimagined the iconic stories of The Simpsons, Apocalypse Now, This is Spinal Tap and Say Anything (from the Festival’s retrospective series) using one of the world’s oldest forms of storytelling: Egyptian hieroglyphs.

We partnered with an Egyptologist from Brown University to keep us true to the integrity of the 5,000 year-old language and its precise artistic forms.

To properly tell these stories, we developed a new alphabet for each one. By combining iconography from the films with phonograms and classifiers from the ancient language, we created over 270 hybrid glyphs and symbols that retained the shape and phonetics of the original versions. You could even translate it into English with our app simply by taking a photo.

The project was a success, and led to discoveries in the study of the Egyptian language, created awareness of Tribeca’s diverse offerings and gave our audience a chance to experience their favorite stories like never before.