A decade has passed since Egyptian Swedish director Tarik Saleh was forced to leave Egypt at high speed just as he was about to shoot police corruption drama The Nile Hilton Incident, the first film in his Cairo trilogy.
“It was a very explicit threat. They said that if you don’t leave with your crew within five days, we cannot guarantee your safety, which means that they will do something,” Saleh told the audience at the Lumière Film Festival in Lyon this week.
He was speaking after a screening of new film Eagles of the Republic starring his longtime collaborator Fares Fares as Egyptian movie star George Fahmy who is coerced into playing Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in a film eulogizing his ascent to power in 2014.
The film premiered in Competition in Cannes and is now gearing up for its wide release in France by Memento Distribution. It is also Sweden’s entry for the Best International Feature Film category of the 2026 Oscars.
Saleh was a guest this year at the Heritage-focused Lumiere Festival spearheaded by Cannes delegate general Thierry Frémaux, in his other role as head of Institut Lumière, alongside Natalie Portman, Sean Penn and career honorary Michael Mann.
Ten years after his expulsion, Saleh’s third feature in the trilogy, after Boy From Heaven, socks it to Egypt’s military leaders and General Intelligence Service (GIS), and by implication al-Sisi.
It follows protagonist George Fahmy as his becomes unwittingly embroiled in a web of violent political intrigue through the al-Sisi biopic, spearheaded by United Media Services (UMS), the real-life media company created in 2017 with strong links to the GIS.
The storyline was inspired by the case of Yasser Galal who played al-Sisi in the series El Ekhteyar (The Choice), even though his height and full head of hair meant he bore no resemblance to the president. Galal was appointed to the Egyptian senate by al-Sisi just three days ago.
The film was shot in Turkey, with some b-roll captured in Egypt, after a planned shoot in the Moroccan city of Casablanca was also shut down at the eleventh hour.
“I was thrown out. I am always thrown out of countries for some reason,” Saleh told the Lyon audience, explaining to Deadline afterwards that he still had great affection for Morocco but believed the country had gotten cold feet about upsetting Egypt and its army by hosting the shoot.
Egyptian actor Amr Waked plays the sinister figure of Dr. Mansour who monitors the shoot, giving notes when he feels Fahmy is not doing al-Sisi justice.
His involvement in the movie has extra resonance given the fact the actor was forced to flee Egypt in 2017 at the height of his fame, after he posted pro-democracy messages on social media, for which he now faces an eight-year jail sentence back home.
Further cast members include Palestinian American actress and director Cherien Dabis as Fahmy’s longtime co-star who is frozen out of the film business after she refuses to play ball with the regime, as well as rising French Algerian actress Lyna Khoudri and French Moroccan actress Zineb Triki.
The film is beginning its theatrical rollout as al-Sisi enjoys a moment in the international limelight, after President Donald Trump praised the Egyptian president for his role in helping to get the Gaza peace plan overline.
Saleh doubts it will get a theatrical release anywhere in the Middle East and North Africa but told the Lumière audience that thanks to rampant piracy in the region, a lot of Egyptians had watched the previous two films.
“I got a lot of letters from Egyptian police officers who loved the film,” he said, referring to The Nile Hilton Incident.
Beyond the focus on Egypt, Saleh said Eagles of the Republic touches on wider questions around freedom of expression and compromise.
“Most artists throughout history have been hired by the church or the king or the Pharaoh to create art to make them look great,” he said.
“For me, it was also a way of talking about an artist’s role in a society, and how we try to keep our integrity while not losing our privilege. Like all of us, probably we think that it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, and then all of a sudden, it’s not okay anymore.”
He suggested that in the current global geopolitical climate Europe remained, for now, one of the few places on the planet, where artists could create freely.
“I really feel connected to Fritz Lang and Miloš Foreman and to the European filmmakers that went to America because it was a dark time in Europe… they made genres films, films noir and detective films,” he said.
“I believe that there is still freedom of expression in Europe, so I think people will come. People have already come from the Middle East, and they will come from America to make films in Europe.”
Saleh added an anecdote involving his longtime friend, Danish-Iranian The Apprentice and Holy Spider filmmaker Ali Abbasi, to highlight the strange quirks of censorship,
“The Nile Hilton Incident and Holy Spider came out the same year. I was invited to Tehran while he was invited to Cairo,” he recalled with a wry laugh.
Quizzed by the audience, on his expectations for Egypt and the world in general, Saleh said while he was “a bit pessimistic” for the near term, but remained optimistic for the future.
“I have four daughters and when I look at them, I see the future, it looks great, and these old men who try to keep the power, they will die… I believe that the new generation, not my generation, the young generation, they will see through the dreams of materialism and that whole thing.”
In terms of his own future, Saleh said that for now at least he had no plans to revisit Egypt under al-Sisi in his films.
“I have now gone three rounds with al-Sisi and I’m done with him,” he said.
