Culture in crosshairs of Sisi’s Egypt

Said applied for a license to screen the movie in October 2016, only for Egypt’s censorship authority to flood him with paperwork requests until it stopped answering his calls.

“Now it’s been 12 years that I’ve been dreaming of this moment to come and it doesn’t come... It’s killing me,” said the director.

This is the new method to ban films, said Fazulla. “They would keep delaying this for months until the movie does not get screened in the end,” he said.

Another award-winning film, The Nile Hilton Incident directed by Tarik Saleh, a Swede of Egyptian origin, takes place in Egypt but was banned from being shot in the country.

The movie on police corruption is based on a true story, that of real estate tycoon and Mubarak associate Hisham Talaat Moustafa, who was convicted in 2010 of paying for the murder of his ex-lover, a Lebanese pop diva.

Music has also been a casualty. In July, Cairokee, a popular band, said the censorship authority had banned some songs from their 2017 album A Drop of White, which features calls for political freedoms.

But the banned songs are widely available on the Web.

Heavy metal has been in the firing line of Egypt’s state-recognised Musicians’ Syndicate since it tried to have a gig called off in February 2016.

In April 2016, a concert by Brazilian band Sepultura was cancelled and event organiser Nader Sadek spent several days behind bars on suspicion of having failed to secure a permit.