Imami development of the plot – Newspaper Kommersant No. 208 (7409) of 11/10/2022

The Cairo Plot, a political thriller directed by Egyptian-born Swedish director Tariq Saleh, is being released, which won the Best Screenplay award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and was also nominated for an Oscar by Sweden. Tells Yulia Shagelman.

In 2017, Tarik Saleh’s film “The Incident at the Neil Hilton Hotel” – a crime thriller about the murder of a popular singer and total corruption in the Cairo police – was banned from screening in Egypt, and the director himself, who was born in Stockholm, the son of an Egyptian, ended up in his historical homeland persona non grata. Therefore, for his new picture, the Muslim University of Al-Azhar, located in the Egyptian capital, the center of Islamic education, had to be filmed in Turkey – its “role” was played by the Suleymaniye Mosque. The plot of The Cairo Conspiracy is such that this film is also unlikely to have a successful release in Egypt: it is again about corruption and decay, but this time Saleh aims higher, talking about the conspiracy of the secret services and Islamic spiritual leaders in order to control minds and souls of citizens.

“The country doesn’t need two pharaohs,” says the general of state security (Mohammad Bakri), when the great imam of Al-Azhar suddenly dies and the election of his successor comes up. The new hierarch, who is to take this rank for life, must agree with the president on all issues, so that the elections cannot be left to the will of Allah. To ensure that the right candidate becomes the great imam, the general instructs the young ambitious security official Sohbi (Mo Ayub), who insists on simply and without fuss eliminating all other applicants. But the direct execution of the task falls on the shoulders of the experienced Colonel Ibrahim (Saleh’s favorite actor Fares Fares, who starred in The Incident at the Neil Hilton Hotel), who tends to be more accurate and cautious methods.

Meanwhile, in a remote fishing village on the shores of Lake Manzala, a young man with the ancestral name Adam (Taufik Barhom) literally receives news from heaven – a letter about enrolling in Al-Azhar and assigning him a scholarship. Adam is the middle of the three sons of a widowed father, but contrary to fairy tales, he is the smartest. The village imam, who himself graduated from the university, sees great potential in him: perhaps the student will someday be able to surpass him and achieve more, and the illiterate father, although he would prefer his son to follow in his footsteps and become a fisherman, resigns himself to fate. Adam travels to Cairo to meet the light of learning and the temptations of the big city, though he doesn’t yet know that the walls of Al-Azhar hide sins far more serious than a cigarette snatched or a nightly escape to the dance with a can of energy.

The naive provincial is immediately taken under the wing of an older classmate Zizo (Mehdi Dehbi), but his motives are far from just friendly. In fact, he is an informant of Colonel Ibrahim, who has long been embedded in the university, and now, when Al-Azhar has become unsettled after the death of the great imam, he wants to leave the game, and offer Adam as his replacement. Zizo does not have time to fully prepare him and dedicate all the details: he is killed right in the courtyard of the university (with a saber, no more, no less). Adam, still unaccustomed to the new world outside his native village, finds himself at the very center of a multi-level political intrigue, and Ibrahim becomes his mentor in espionage, like the sheikh teachers in Al-Azhar, instructing him in Islam.

Tariq Saleh, who wrote the Cannes award-winning screenplay himself, tries to combine two lines in one film. On the one hand, The Cairo Conspiracy is a psychological drama about lost illusions and about the fact that, stepping on a dirty road, it is impossible not to get dirty yourself (performing the tasks of the colonel, Adam sets up his fellow student, exposing him to serious danger, and closer by the end, he is already confidently organizing the fall of one of the contenders for the rank of great imam, while not showing any particular moral suffering). On the other hand, this is an old-school spy thriller in the cool-aloof spirit of Le Carré, where the work of the special services is completely devoid of exciting twists and turns, chases and gunfights; instead of them – a continuous routine, stagnant cigarette smoke, cold coffee and digging in someone else’s garbage.

At the same time, the main character remains a closed book throughout the film: he accepts everything that happens to him so calmly (at least outwardly), almost without losing his composure even when the curators from state security begin to threaten his family, that the neurotic Ibrahim can only envy . Perhaps this is what makes Adam such an effective tool in the hands of the special services, but Saleh cuts off the story of his transformation in mid-sentence, returning his hero to the starting point, as if he himself does not know where he will move next and whether such a movement is possible in principle. At the same point, everyone else freezes, and the film, which began with the promise of change, ends with a completely pessimistic statement of the rigidity of the political system, built on the fusion of religious dogmas and the most earthly interests of the people in power.