Tarik Saleh’s paranoid Cairo
 

PostED ON15.10.2025

According to Saleh, cinema is first and foremost a moral art. ‘Every image must ask a question.’ He films the way one interrogates — with the sharpness of the graffiti artist he once was, aware that the surface is likely a façade. 

© Atmo Production - Arte France Cinema - Film i Vast - Final Cut for Real
- Memento Films - Oy Bufo Ab - Sveriges Television (SVT)
Cairo Conspiracy/Boy from Heaven (2022)

Tarik Saleh was raised in Stockholm by an Egyptian father and a Swedish mother. ‘As a child, I watched Arabic television without understanding the words, but I could sense the political tension in people's faces.’ His cinema was born of this initial divergence: two shores, two narratives, two truths. Before delving into fiction, Saleh made documentaries focused on power, religion and propaganda. The festival celebrates a filmmaker whose Cairo Trilogy now forms the beating heart of a rare and coherent œuvre. Three films and as many variations on corruption and survival: The Nile Hilton Incident (2017), Cairo Conspiracy/Boy from Heaven (2022), and Eagles of the Republic (2025). Together, they provide a moral assessment of Egypt today. ‘I don't make films about Egypt; I make films from it. It's a laboratory of power, and I recognise that power everywhere.’

The Nile Hilton Incident is a sharp crime thriller that opens with the murder of an actress in the midst of the Arab Spring. Noureddin, the cop  (incarnated by the colossal Fares Fares, a Swedish actor of Lebanese origin who features in all three films), plays the role of the cynic, yet strives to find a shred of honour in a city where everything is for sale. Saleh films Cairo as a diseased organism of dull neon lights, dusty corridors, monitored desires. It's a ‘love letter’ nonetheless, ‘to a country that is being prevented from breathing’, confides the filmmaker. With Cairo Conspiracy/Boy from Heaven, he transposes the struggle to Al-Azhar University, where a student discovers the relentless mechanics of religion and the state. The thriller – filmed in Turkey – is a clear allegory of clerical power, playing with symbols to demonstrate mind manipulation. ‘I wanted to treat faith like an invisible battlefield,’ says Saleh. ‘Men of power use God to blind others.’ Eagles of the Republic, the final instalment, refocuses the investigation on the security apparatus. Fear is no longer a context, but a means to an end. The mise en scène mirrors the mechanics of the domination it denounces: containment, control, coercion. 

© Yigit Eken - Unlimited Stories - Apparaten - Memento Films Production - Strom Pictures - Oy Bufo Ab
Eagles of the Republic (2025)

For Saleh, the trilogy is an exercise in introspection: ‘By filming Cairo, I’m filming my own contradictions. I belong to two worlds that mistrust each other. My cinema is a false passport, but a necessary one.’ Today, his work circulates like a persistent rumour: that of a cinema that seeks truth not in facts, but in how they are observed. Masterful.

Carlos Gomez

Master class
Meet Tarik Saleh
Wednesday, 15 October at 3 pm at Pathé Bellecour

The programme

The Nile Hilton Incident  by Tarik Saleh ( 2017, 1h50)
Lumière Terreaux Wed 15 5:15pm | Institut Lumière (Hangar) Thu 16 2:30pm

Cairo Conspiracy/Boy from Heaven by Tarik Saleh (Walad min al-Janna, 2022, 2h)
UGC Astoria Wed 15 8:30pm