Following the ascent of a young man at Al-Azhar University, Tarik Saleh describes political power and his contradictions.
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The previous film by Tarik Saleh, confidential Cairo, married the form of the police investigation to shed light on the functioning of Egyptian society, a company then in full swing. Generalized corruption – the hero of the film, a policeman, succumbed himself to it by a kind of habit – appeared less as a moral and scandalous fault than as the largely accepted way with which the interpersonal relationships and the relationship of individuals were regularized with power.
The form of the criminal story therefore constituted less an imposed pretext than the very truth of the world that the film described. With the conspiracy of Cairo, which was shot in Turkey and won the screenplay prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022, the filmmaker continues, with intelligence, to drive the same nail, in the service, this time, of a description of political power and its contradictions.
We can certainly define the film as a kind of spying thriller, but it would undoubtedly be just as wise, if not more, to see the exposure, in a condensed form, of the tensions that cross the spheres of the state and their relationships with other superstructures in contemporary Egypt. The suspense, while constituting a cunning way of giving body and substance to a form of ordinary terror, is here the instrument of an instinctive knowledge of oppression.
place of confrontations
be the principle of the infiltrated agent and the rhetoric that accompanies this motif. Adam, a modest fisherman’s son, is admitted to Al-Azhar University, a prestigious teaching institution of Sunni Islam located in Cairo. This is the promise for the young man of a programmed social ascent.
The sudden death of the Imam who directs the university provokes a fight of succession within the school between various religious who maintain different relationships with political power, hostility to frank collaboration. A colonel of state security (the amazing Fares Fares) manages to recruit Adam, to make him his informant and, above all, the actor and the event agent likely to bring to the head of Al- Azhar the leader desired by political power.
The proposed show is therefore based on the fear that the double game of a hero (just as much toy of secret services that subject acting) be discovered and on a series of filled strokes, reversals of situation and of situation and Various betrayals.
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