Tarik Saleh • Director
"It’s our duty to ensure greater value is placed on film"
- We met with the director behind The Nile Hilton Incident and Boy from Heaven, who’s also a member of the filmmakers’ jury at MyFrenchFilmFestival, while in Paris

Revealed in Venice’s Critics’ Week in 2009 by way of Metropia [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] and awarded the Grand Prize in the 2017 Sundance Film Festival thanks to The Nile Hilton Incident [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Tarik Saleh
film profile] and the Best Screenplay trophy in Cannes 2022 via Boy from Heaven [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Tarik Saleh
film profile], the Swedish director of Egyptian origin Tarik Saleh is currently in Paris serving on the filmmakers’ jury in the 15th MyFrenchFilmFestival (read our article), whilst also finalising editing on his upcoming movie, Eagles of the Republic.
Cineuropa: You agreed to be a jury member for the MyFrenchFilmFestival, which is an online event. What’s your opinion on how films should be seen?
Tarik Saleh: I’m fanatical about going to the cinema, so for me, films should obviously be seen in movie theatres. Watching a film on a computer, being able to press pause and then resume viewing is a completely different experience. Moreover, Fellini said that remote controls are fascist inventions because they hand over control to the viewer, and I agree with that as a filmmaker because I want complete control over my films. But I also think that cinema now finds itself in an existential position where it’s first and foremost important to value the fact that people make films and not series. It’s our duty to ensure greater value is placed on film, especially knowing how much work is involved in making them, regardless of whether they’re successes or failures.
I also agreed to be part of the jury because it’s really interesting to only be watching French films, and not even the ones which have made headlines or triumphed in Cannes or elsewhere. In a sense, it’s a way of taking a good look at a country. By watching all the films in the MyFrenchFilmFestival, you can gauge the current state of affairs in France and find out what people are thinking right now. It’s fascinating because I’m not familiar with France, which is a little ironic given that my films do really well over here, which I can’t really explain. But when I watch the films in this selection, I understand a little something about this country, I learn about the struggles and conflicts which are currently unfolding here, and it’s captivating.
Do you think broadcasting films online might draw younger audiences back towards the 7th art?
I’m not sure. I’m not an advocate of the digital world. Techniques and distribution are the domain of people who manage the business side of things, who always get excited about new broadcasting methods. Cinemas were pronounced dead back when TV was invented, but look where we are now: cinemas are still here and TV is dead. Video cassettes were also supposed to kill off the cinema: but video cassettes are dead and cinemas are still going. And it’s the same for DVDs and Blu-ray. These different distribution channels are mainly good for corporations who can use them to sell even more of their works than before. And they don’t even need to go via a factory now, they just distribute their films via a signal straight into people’s homes. So, of course, Netflix declared that cinemas were dead, claiming its platform was the only place to watch films. But it’s not the case, and they were terrified when they realised filmmakers like James Cameron and Christopher Nolan were still making films and that scores of people were going to see them in cinemas. That’s also the case with my own films, on my own, individual scale. Obviously, given that I have quite small children, I sometimes watch films at home on a small screen. But when a film is really good, it transcends screen size. In fact, the first time I saw The Godfather 2 - which is in my top 3 favourite films - it was on video cassette and it was still a masterpiece, despite the lower quality of VHS, which says something about the quality of really good films. And I was also really moved by some of the films in the MyFrenchFilmFestival.
The French firm Memento Production was a co-production partner on Boy From Heaven, as it is on Eagles of the Republic. How did this relationship come about?
The relationship I’ve forged with Alexandre Mallet-Guy is a really unique one. He’d bought The Nile Hilton Incident and the first time I travelled to Paris for the film’s release, he told me something that no other distributor had ever told me before: "Tarik, you’ve directed an excellent film, it will sell at least 200,000 tickets in France; if not, it will mean I didn’t do my job properly." I was staggered because I’d never heard a distributor take their responsibilities as seriously as that. Generally, they prefer to tell me they don’t have any particular expectations. After that, I worked in the US for a few years, and from time to time I’d meet up with Alexandre in Paris. He’d say to me: "please, Tarik, come back to Europe, make your films here, you shouldn’t be working within the American system. You’ve got a genuine audience right here." So when I decided to return to Europe with a few new film ideas, Alexandre was involved in that conversation. So we made Boy From Heaven together and then he was involved in my following film from very early on in the process. I called him and told him that I had three screenplays, and that I wanted his opinion on them. Because I always write three screenplays to compete with myself: if you only have one, you can end up lying to yourself, telling yourself that it’s good just because you need to work. If you have three, you can compare them and pick out the best one. That’s how I chose Eagles of the Republic (read our news), which I subsequently shot and which I’m going to show Alexandre for the first time next weekend; he’s the film’s co-producer and he’s also the distributor in France.
What will you take from your American experience (directing the feature film The Contractor and two episodes of the Westworld and Ray Donovan series)?
I learned a lot, but the problem, over and above not having the final cut, is that the system is broken over there and fear is omnipresent. Most European countries also have their problems when it comes to art and culture. In France, culture is part of people’s identity, although I know certain politicians would like that to stop. They’re clearly idiots, because without culture, France would fall apart. France is a cultural superpower, it’s undeniable, and you can ask all the filmmakers in the world about it, even the biggest names in America: France is really important to them because they know that, here, people take culture and cinema, in particular, very seriously. And when you think about the film sector in its entirety, from production through to film exploitation, there are only two superpowers in the game: France and the USA. Obviously, there are some brilliant films in Japan, Korea, Mexico, Italy, etc., but France and the USA have the same attitude: it’s not the language that matters but the film language. A French film could just as easily be in Chinese, Arabic or Japanese, because the main idea is that it’s cinema. And it’s more or less the same in the USA when they try to attract directors from the rest of the world to draw upon their savoir-faire.
I’m at this strange place in my career where I’m free to do what I want. If I end up making another film in America, it will be my film. But I like the idea of being able to move the centre of the universe to a particular place, and that’s what cinema allows us to do, very powerfully. For lots of people, the centre of the film world is America, in Los Angeles or New York, with the idea of a Roman Empire and everywhere else just being enclaves of that Empire. I believe that Cairo is the centre of the universe, and film allows us to project ourselves there for a couple of hours. Being paid to go and work in the US is nice but being able to invite viewers into a place where they’ve never been and amongst characters they’ve never known is far better. Because when I watch a Korean film, I’m not just in Korea, I become a Korean person in Korea: that’s far better than virtual reality.
(Translated from French)
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