From Tarik Saleh, exiled Swedish-Egyptian director of political drama The Nile Hilton Incident (2017) which we screened at Film Club previously, comes this superb new conspiracy thriller set on a Cairo campus. Winner of Best Screenplay at Cannes, 2022. 

“Set inside Cairo’s Al-Azhar University – Istanbul’s Suleymanye Mosque makes a suitably grand stand-in – Cairo Conspiracy chronicles the skulduggery behind the election of a grand imam. Adam (Barhom), a naive youngster from a fishing village on a scholarship to Al-Azhar, is warned by fellow student Zizo that: “Your soul is pure, but every second in this place will corrupt it.” As if to demonstrate the point, Zizo is murdered not long after. The malleable Adam is promptly recruited as a mole by Colonel Ibrahim (Fares), a shadowy representative of the state security agency… A deserving winner of the best screenplay at Cannes last year, this nail-biting drama [has] shades of All the President’s Men and The Name of the Rose.” Tara Brady, The Irish Times 

Director / Cyfarwyddwr: Tarik Saleh 

Cast: Tawfeek Barhom, Fares Fares, Mohammad Bakri, Makram Khoury2022