A vision of dissent: Tarik Saleh on his acclaimed Cairo trilogy
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Joseph Fahim
on
Fri, 06/05/2026 - 09:24
Saleh talks to Middle East Eye about his series that started with the film The Nile Hilton Incident, which premiered around the time of the 2011 revolution
Egyptian-Swedish director Tarik Saleh at a press conference for his film Eagles of the Republic at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2025 (Julie Sebadelha/AFP)
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Tarik Saleh still has hope for his series of films that have earned the ire of the Egyptian political establishment.
"My dream is to have a screening of this trilogy in a freer Egypt, 10 to 15 years from now," he said.
In 2010, the Egyptian-Swedish filmmaker was widely hailed as one of the most exciting emerging voices in Scandinavian cinema.
His 2009 animated dystopian fable Metropia premiered at the Venice Film Festival to critical and commercial acclaim.
Two years later, he directed I Follow Rivers for singer Lykke Li, an iconic music video that has since amassed nearly 100 million views on YouTube.
Yet his Swedish output ultimately served as a prelude to what would become one of the most controversial cinematic trilogies ever made about contemporary Egypt.
Born to a Swedish mother and Egyptian father, Saleh moved to Alexandria in 1991 to study at the Academy of Arts.
Over the next four years, he lived between Mansoura, his father’s hometown in the Nile Delta, and Cairo.
His ambition to tell Egyptian stories never waned.
In 2010, he completed the screenplay for The Nile Hilton Incident, a neo-noir inspired by the murder of Lebanese singer Suzanne Tamim at the hands of real-estate tycoon and Mubarak ally Hisham Talaat Moustafa.
Released in 2017 and set on the eve of the 2011 revolution, Nile Hilton became an international sensation, winning the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and drawing more than 400,000 admissions in France alone.
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»
Its success attracted Hollywood’s attention. Between 2018 and 2022, Saleh directed episodes of HBO’s Westworld and Showtime’s Ray Donovan, in addition to helming the action flick The Contractor starring Chris Pine.
In 2022, he returned to Egypt with Boy from Heaven (also known as Cairo Conspiracy), another noir examining the relationship between Al-Azhar and the regime of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
The film proved an even greater success, winning Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival and selling more than 460,000 tickets in France.
Last year, Saleh completed his Cairo trilogy with Eagles of the Republic, its most provocative and audacious chapter. Saleh regular Fares Fares stars as George Fahmy, Egypt’s biggest movie star, coerced into portraying the president in a military propaganda production modelled after the real-life television series Al Ekhteyar (The Choice).
A liberal Trotskyist Coptic Christian at odds with the Sisi regime due to his ties to the opposition, Fahmy has allowed his convictions to erode beneath compulsive womanising, negligent parenting, and consuming self-centredness.
Beneath the vanity, however, lingers an instinctive decency struggling to resist a mediocre political order obsessed with preserving its authority and force-feeding its triumphalist rhetoric to an exhausted populace.
Dovetailing with the 2011 revoution
Saleh never intended to create a trilogy when he embarked on Nile Hilton, a project born from dissatisfaction with his earlier work.
“I felt that the one story I needed to tell was about corruption in Egypt,” Saleh told Middle East Eye.
“The impetus came from what happened to my father when he tried to open a children's museum in El Qanater during the Mubarak years. The military took over the project in a very aggressive way.
“The initial draft was not good. I also wasn't sure it was even possible to make it - who would finance it, how we'd shoot it. And then the revolution happened.”
Counterrevolution in Egypt: How Sisi broke the dream of a new republic
»
From the outset, Saleh imagined a mass uprising closing the film. His vision of revolution, he now says, “was pathetic”, consisting merely of “people running through the streets”, because it was so difficult to imagine what was coming.
The events of January 2011 convinced him there was something within the story capable of explaining how such an upheaval became possible.
At the time, international audiences were eager for revolution-cantered narratives, but not this kind.
“European producers kept asking me, ‘Why can’t you just make a film about the revolutionaries?’” Saleh recalled.
His film, however, remained noir through and through - an anomaly within the social realism dominating post-Arab uprisings cinema.
Above all, it was a vivid portrait of Cairo, “a city I love so much… a city I’m obsessed with.”
The Hollywood ‘machine’
His move into Hollywood stemmed largely from necessity. Contrary to claims made by detractors, the acclaim surrounding Nile Hilton did not deliver the financial security or the prestige critics assumed he sought.
“I did the Hollywood work because, frankly, I was broke,” Saleh said. “I had a new baby and needed the money. I couldn’t say no when the Americans came calling.”
He describes Hollywood as “a machine”.
“It’s a sausage factory,” he said. “But there are things they do exceptionally well - the seriousness and discipline with which they work - and I took that from them.”
After The Nile Hilton Incident, Saleh wrote three additional scripts about Egypt.
The trilogy was originally envisioned as a quartet, with the unmade fourth film focusing explicitly on the army.
Boy from Heaven began as a novel before evolving into a screenplay. Whereas Nile Hilton, set during the Mubarak years, retained some distance from post-revolutionary reality, Boy from Heaven was fully immersed in Sisi’s Egypt.
Eagles of the Republic is easily the trilogy’s most incendiary entry. While previous Egyptian regimes occasionally tolerated criticism of the police or religious institutions - though rarely Al-Azhar itself - Egyptian cinema has largely remained sacrosanct.
Only a handful of films, such as Atef Salem’s Hafiat ala Jisr al-Thahab (Barefoot on a Golden Bridge, 1976), have directly confronted the decadence of the industry.
Adhering closely to the larger-than-life reality of Egyptian cinema, many of Saleh’s characters are inspired by recognisable public figures.
These range from the leftist actress Rula Haddad, played by Cherien Dabis, who is blacklisted after refusing to collaborate with the regime, to the bald, imposing head of a state-owned studio clearly modelled after Tamer Morsi, former CEO of United Media Services.
George Fahmy himself evokes Yasser Galal, the television actor who portrayed Sisi in the third instalment of Al Ekhteyar.
Yet Eagles and Boy from Heaven also share an intriguing atemporality. Both unfold within a recognisable present haunted by a past in which similar power dynamics between the state and its foundational institutions repeat themselves endlessly.
In Saleh’s Egypt, history is circular and not linear.
In that sense, Sisi is not the antagonist Saleh's critics designated him to be.
"I actually thought having Sisi in the films would be a limitation. He's not your typical charismatic but sinister dictator like Stalin or Hitler," he said.
"But you also can't avoid him, especially when making a political thriller. Had I left him out, people would've assumed I was afraid."
Avoiding state cooption
The genesis of Eagles emerged from a single hypothetical: what if Saleh had remained in Egypt after graduating from art school, worked within the local film industry, and received the same phone call George Fahmy receives - demanding that he direct state propaganda?
“Had I stayed, I would probably have become like most directors there, hustling, taking on jobs I felt no passion for, attending the Gouna Film Festival. And once that call came, I wouldn’t have been able to refuse, because saying no is not an option.”
Making George Fahmy Coptic was not arbitrary, though Saleh admits the dimension remains somewhat underdeveloped.
Several cultural and political implications surrounding Fahmy’s religious identity were ultimately omitted.
"The position of Copts in Egypt is deeply universal," Saleh said.
"All societies have minorities who work hard, and in some cases outperform members of the majority, yet remain vulnerable to discrimination. It's something I can personally identify with as a Muslim in Sweden."
George possesses immense cultural influence as the country’s most bankable star. Yet Saleh sharply illustrates how, under authoritarian systems - whether in Arab states or the increasingly right-wing western democracies - the fragility of that influence becomes glaringly apparent once someone belongs to a minority.
One persistent gaffe in Eagles is the inconsistency of dialect, more conspicuous here than in the trilogy’s earlier episodes.
Exiled Egyptian actors such as Amr Waked, Donia Massoud, and Hesham Abdel Hamid lend authenticity to the proceedings, but neither Dabis nor French-Algerian actress Lyna Khoudri convince in their embarrassingly creaky Egyptian Arabic.
Saleh is aware of the jarring effect. Yet given the professional risks Egyptian performers face by participating in such a politically contentious project, the pool of established actors willing to join the production was limited.
"It's also a question of responsibility, especially with women performers," Saleh said.
"I didn't have the luxury of choice."
'Crossing the line'
The film culminates in one of the boldest acts of political imagination committed to screen in recent memory. Simply describing its final twist could invite serious repercussions - reason enough, perhaps, why Saleh may not return to Egypt anytime soon.
When asked whether he feared pushing the boundaries so aggressively, Saleh replied: "I like films that cross a line - where suddenly you feel you're in real life; where you can no longer hide behind fiction.
"We're in the Trump era, when self-censorship has become the norm, and I wanted to defy that."
In his calculated coldness, Dr Mansour emerges as perhaps the film’s only forthright character.
As the intelligence operative overseeing the film’s production, Dr Mansour initially comes across as a competent bureaucrat singularly focused on crafting the most polished and persuasive piece of propaganda possible.
Gradually, however, he is revealed to be a hollow instrument driven not by ideology but by cold, ruthless logic, a lethal embodiment of a Machiavellian state hellbent on preserving an order that no one is permitted to challenge.
Saleh's works, such as Eagles of the Republic, have focused on corruption within the Egyptian state (SF Studios)
He is a distant artistic cousin of Anton Chigurh from Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men: a principled man operating outside the moral ambiguity inhabited by everyone around him.
Unlike the prison warden in Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, who rationalises his brutality, Mansour remains untouched by ethical considerations.
Traces of moral justification lingered in Nile Hilton, set during the waning days of the Mubarak regime as the authorities grappled with an abrupt erosion of power.
In the post-revolutionary Egypt of Boy from Heaven and Eagles, however, the regime no longer worries about consolidating authority.
What Saleh investigates instead is a static mode of governance whose tyranny no longer feels uniquely Egyptian, but increasingly global. Its most disturbing feature, he suggests, is its autistic mechanicalness.
Sisi himself, whose intentions and governing philosophy are never directly examined, remains an enigma Saleh refuses to decode.
The invasive machinery controlling George Fahmy is not new; it is merely an updated version of a 75-year-old apparatus that still sees itself as the indispensable guardian of a population deemed too reckless for genuine autonomy.
'The Egyptian films are my babies'
Predictably, Eagles was met with both indifference and hostility, being called “vulgar”, opportunistic” and “creatively and morally bankrupt”. Some Arab critics argued that Saleh continues returning to Egypt only because his Hollywood career failed to take off.
"For the record, I receive scripts from Hollywood almost every week," he said.
"But this assumption, that the ultimate dream is to make Hollywood movies, tells you everything you need to know about these critics.
“Hollywood hire me not because they care about Egypt or Sisi - those executives don't even know who the president of Egypt is. They hire me because they recognise a craft they want to utilise.
"I take on big projects, whether in Hollywood or Sweden, because I naturally need to make a living. I bring everything I have to them - but they're not mine.
"The Egyptian films are my babies, and I always fight hard to make them at a time when European cinema is increasingly turning inward, toward its own culture, history, and language."
When asked whether he sees a growing depoliticisation in global cinema amid the rise of populism and nationalism, Saleh agreed.
He recently discussed the issue with Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abbasi, whose incendiary Trump biopic The Apprentice struggled to secure wide US distribution after premiering in 2024 in Cannes.
"Ali said, 'Arab filmmakers can criticise all they want, but they can't criticise their own governments' - though I don't fully agree," Saleh said.
"There are filmmakers doing subversive work. I know how incredibly difficult and repressive making such films in Egypt can be, and I know people who paid the price for trying. But I can't help envying Iranian filmmakers, who have never stopped criticising their governments."
Saleh is not finished with Egypt and perhaps he never will be.
“Every door you open in Egypt contains another story,” he said.
“I want to make something in Alexandria - a city I know even better than Cairo. I want to do something in Upper Egypt. There are endless stories there.”
In France alone, more than one million viewers have seen the trilogy. Earlier this year, Eagles of the Republic won six Guldbagge Awards, including Best Film and Best Screenplay. Asked how he felt now that the trilogy had concluded, Saleh replied: “I feel like I’ve built a monument, and now I feel liberated. I’m finally done confronting this regime. I’m proud I never compromised.”
Then he added: “The one missing piece is that I still can’t screen these films in Egyptian cinemas.”
His next project will be in English and unrelated to Egypt. Yet he is already writing another Egyptian screenplay.
This time, it’s a western.
Eagles of the Republic is currently in cinemas in the US and the UK
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