Tarik Saleh is the Swedish-Egyptian director who made The Nile Hilton Incident in 2017, a shrewd, dyspeptic movie about the official corruption in Egypt that triggered the Tahrir Square uprising. Now in an era when the Arab spring has arguably become a bittersweet memory, he has brought to the Cannes competition this watchable conspiracy espionage-drama satirising the corruption of church and state. There’s an intriguing mix of scorn and paranoia here, together with a yearning for individual figures of decency halfway down the food chain – it reminded me of John le Carré.
Adam (Tawfeek Barhom) is a fisherman’s son in the northern town of Manzala who is overjoyed to receive news from his local imam that he is getting a lavish state sponsorship to study Islamic thought at Cairo’s internationally prestigious Al-Azhar University. This is a dizzying honour. Once at the university, he is overawed by the discipline, the rigour and the atmosphere of piety but disconcerted also when a fellow student offers him a cigarette – of all the louche things – and invites him out for a secular night on the town. Their seat of learning is stunned when its ageing chief imam drops dead of a heart attack while addressing the student body, and straight away there is political jockeying from the other imams as to who is take over a position of enormous political influence.
