22/05/2025 - CANNES 2025: The Swedish filmmaker of Egyptian origin unpicks his captivating film noir, which is the third chapter of his Cairo-based trilogy

(© 2025 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it)

Unveiled in competition at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, Eagles of the Republic [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Tarik Saleh
film profile] is the third instalment of Tarik Saleh’s Cairo-based trilogy, following on from The Nile Hilton Incident [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Tarik Saleh
film profile] (awarded the Grand Jury Prize in Sundance 2017) and Boy From Heaven [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Tarik Saleh
film profile] (the winner of Cannes’ screenplay trophy in 2022). During a round-table discussion, the Swedish filmmaker of Egyptian origin looked back on the genesis of and philosophy behind his film, which revolves around the character of George Fahmy, a national cinema star who’s caught up in a film controlled by the State and which glorifies the incumbent president, whom George is supposed to be portraying.

Is this character a victim or a collaborator? According to Tarik Saleh, "George is all of us. It’s a film about a man who bends to the point of breaking. We’re all actors, we all play a part in each of our lives and if someone unmasks us it’s very painful and we feel exposed. But I’d probably do the same thing as George in the film. He’s the one I most identify with, but there’s also the character of Doctor Mansour, who’s actually the director of the film within the film and the adult in the room who sometimes has to do unpleasant things for things to work, to keep things stable. The cruellest role is the official director’s, who’s not allowed to carry out his work unimpeded. I’ve had the pleasure and pain of working in Los Angeles where directors are seen as paper tigers and where very few of them have as much power as the star actors."

On recreating Cairo, the filmmaker stressed that "the magic of cinema is being able to replicate the soul of a particular place. Cairo is a very special city; you can’t ever conquer it, it’s the city that breaks you. But it’s a rite of passage for all ambitious artists from the Middle East and North Africa. So as to capture the spirit of Cairo, I shot two films in Istanbul, which is also at the heart of an empire, like Rome, Paris and New York. The last time I got to travel to Egypt was in 2015 and the film is a recreation of my reality, not of the Egyptian reality. Obviously, I’m in close contact with a lot of Egyptians and I’m obsessive about keeping up to speed with what’s going on in the army and in the local film industry. The military parade in the film, for example, is a real thing. It hasn’t been held in public since the assassination of Sadate in 1981, but it’s filmed inside the Military Academy, and I’m a specialist on the subject now."

When it comes to his film immersing itself in the Egyptian film industry on a fictional level, Tarik Saleh reminded us that the sector "has an extraordinary legacy. It was created by real icons and it fuelled the dreams and hopes of a billion viewers. But when el-Sisi came to power, the army intruded and took control of the entire economy, including the film industry. They primarily produced a very big budget TV series about el-Sisi’s rise to power. When I saw it, I thought it was absurd, but I did wonder what working on that series would have been like. Maybe if I’d lived in Egypt, I would have been forced to work on that production. I started thinking about that, and that’s how I wrote the screenplay. Some people think my film is a satire, but it really isn’t. It’s an enormous system which no-one is putting a stop to. To give you an example, I had to shoot a section of the film in Egypt, and the national security services’ reaction when they see the film won’t be to wonder how we did it, but why they weren’t paid and who ultimately was paid. That’s the problem with this system, which only thinks of its own slice of the pie."

In terms of how this third film rounds off his Cairo trilogy, and on the subject of genre film, the director explained that "the three films are connected, but they take place in different arenas. The first and third are pure examples of film noir, which I consider to be the hardest summit to scale, generally speaking, in the genre film world, whereas the second chapter was a spy thriller. Eagles of the Republic is especially pure in its references to noir films along the lines of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. I took inspiration from that tradition of European filmmakers who’d witnessed the horrors of fascism on the Old Continent and who then emigrated to the USA to make these films. There might also be elements of Topaz by Alfred Hitchcock in my movie. But I don’t make films as directly referential as the ones I love by the Coen brothers, for example. And now I’m going to change direction to focus on inspiring characters who change things."

(Translated from French)