Eagles of the Republic (Drama)

Rating:

Director: Tarik Saleh
Producer: Linda Mutawi,Alexandre Mallet-Guy,Linus Stöhr Torell,Johan Lindström
Screenwriter: Tarik Saleh
Composer: Alexandre Desplat
Editor: Theis Schmidt
Production Designer: Roger Rosenberg
Costume Designer: Virginie Montel
Key Cast: Amr Waked,Lyna Khoudri,Fares Fares,Ahmed Kairy,Zineb Triki,Cherien Dabis

When he takes on one leading role too many, an Egyptian celebrity becomes a pawn for an oppressive regime he believes can’t touch him.

Veteran Egyptian movie star George Fahmy (Fares Fares) thinks he can get away with anything. The film censorship board can’t dilute his horny blockbusters like The First Egyptian on the Moon; while offscreen, separated from his wife and uni student son, he savours public adulation and secular pleasures with his much younger mistress. Even when government goons coerce the ‘Pharaoh of the Screen’ to star in a propaganda biopic as real-life president Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, George is confident he can control the narrative. But once Sisi’s top officials have him in their rotten, bureaucratic beaks and talons, George begins to realise that an authoritarian leader might be less dangerous than the vicious schemes of those hovering in the background.

In this Cannes-selected culmination of Tarik Saleh’s Cairo trilogy of films about Egyptian institutional corruption (The Nile Hilton Incident, MIFF 2017; Boy From Heaven, MIFF 2022), what begins as a rollicking satire on celebrity worship and filmmaking’s ideological obligations soon knife-twists into a violent political-conspiracy thriller. Fares (Rogue One) – who also played key roles in Saleh’s two previous Cairo films – is immensely charismatic as a man who discovers that, even for the rich and famous, power can have its limits.

“A satire with a dissident energy and a dark denouement, it’s an Armando Iannucci-esque send-up of something deadly serious.” – Time Out