UNDER HIS EYE
A young student’s dream turns into a nightmare in this riveting Egyptian spy thriller.
I’m a John le Carré fanatic!’ exclaims Swedish/Egyptian filmmaker Tarik Saleh (The Nile Hilton Incident, The Contractor) on a sunny Cannes rooftop. The spymaster’s influence is plain to see in Cairo Conspiracy,
a film which swaps Le Carré’s typical Cold War backdrop for Al-Azhar University in Cairo – the epicentre of power in Sunni Islam – while retaining a similar sense of dread-fuelled paranoia.
Tawfeek Barhom stars as Adam, a fisherman’s son invited to study at his faith’s most respected academic institution. But shortly after enrolling, the Grand Imam dies, leaving a power vacuum at Al-Azhar’s highest levels. Around the same time, Adam witnesses the assassination of a fellow student by masked assailants on university grounds, and is approached by state security officer Ibrahim (Fares Fares), who reveals that the murdered student reported to him, and he wants Adam as his next spy.
‘I am, at heart, a system critic,’ notes Saleh, little surprise given his film’s bold criticism of Egypt’s clerical and secular institutions. ‘A lot of films, both in Europe and the States, they say that the system is great, and then there is a bad guy. But if we get rid of the bad guy, it’s all good. Whereas I am a noir guy – I believe we should always be sceptical of power and people in power. I think that power corrupts.’
Saleh has plenty of experience with Egyptian state security – three days before
The Nile Hilton Incident was to film in Cairo in 2015, the filmmaker was ordered to leave the country, and has ‘been on a list of undesirables’ ever since. Cairo Conspiracy was shot, instead, in Turkey, with Istanbul’s Süleymanye Mosque standing in for Al-Azhar. Despite all this, Saleh claims he didn’t set out to make a political film.
‘The plot sort of made it more political,’ clarifies Saleh, who took home the Best Screenplay award at Cannes, where the film was titled
Boy from Heaven. ‘I’m very interested in politics, but I also think it’s very dangerous to do verdicts.’ The verdict on Cairo Conspiracy: don’t miss it.
CAIRO CONSPIRACY OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 14 APRIL.