“We are living in a time when it’s a superpower to be a celebrity”: Tarik Saleh on the culmination of his Cairo trilogy

For a filmmaker who has just completed his so-called ‘Cairo trilogy’, with this month’s startling political thriller Eagles of the Republic, there’s a great irony in the fact that Tarik Saleh left Egypt’s capital for good in 2015. He was a week away from shooting the first movie in this trio, The Nile Hilton Incident (2017), when he was advised to leave. “They just told us: ‘Tarik, leave with your foreign friends. You have a week. After we cannot protect you.’”

‘They’, a word that comes up a great deal in Eagles of the Republic, refers to the oppressive State Security that reinforces the rule of Fattah el-Sisi, who came to power in 2014 and remains Egypt’s president to this day. After staging a military coup, Sisi toppled Mohamed Morsi, who only two years earlier had become Egypt’s first democratically elected president following events of the Arab Spring.

Saleh left Cairo, shooting The Nile Hilton Incident in Casablanca, but not before he discovered that his driver had, reluctantly, been spying on him. “They had taken him and they had forced him to inform on me.” It was enough to inspire the second in the trilogy, Cairo Conspiracy (2022), a tale of corruption in the city’s prestigious Al-Azhar University, in which a young student is forced to infiltrate and spy on a group of extremists as the election for the new Grand Imam takes place.

Saleh now completes the trilogy with Eagles of the Republic, a contemporary-set tale that, as with the previous two films, boasts the dynamic presence of actor Fares Fares. Here, Fares plays George Fahmy, an Egyptian movie star known as ‘the Pharaoh of the screen’. Despite his huge popularity in films like ‘The First Egyptian in Space’, Fahmy is not above the authorities, as he discovers when he signs on to shoot a government-backed biopic of Sisi. Playing the Egyptian president, it makes him a reluctant instrument of state propaganda.

While there are moments of levity in the script, not least when Fahmy covertly buys Viagra only to find the pharmacist is a huge fan, Saleh is keen to clarify the film’s approach. “I get very frustrated when people call this film a satire,” he notes. “It’s unfortunately not. It is very serious…and I don’t mean serious in a boring way, because personally, one of my top three films is Tropic Thunder (2008), and that tells you everything you need to know about me! I’m a person that likes to laugh. But at the same time, it’s not a satire.”

In Saleh’s worldview, modern-day politics has gone beyond satire. “I mean, Zelensky is an actor, Trump is a reality star. We are living in a time when it’s a superpower to be a celebrity. People are more interested in what Kim Kardashian and Kanye West have to say than someone that has actually gone to university and has something substantial to say. Not to be hyperbolic about it, but it sounds a little bit like the end of a civilisation.”

On the set of ‘Will of the People’, the name given to the Sisi biopic, Fahmy’s performance is overseen by Dr Mansour (Amr Waked), a government official whose sole is job is to ensure the production will meet with Sisi’s approval. Saleh recalls showing the film to the esteemed composer Alexandre Desplat, who provided the score. “He called me and said, ‘This is a film about the man selling his soul piece by piece.’” While in agreement, Saleh came to his own conclusions when he rewatched the film, sitting alone one day. “I realised this film is about lying and the consequences of lying.”

Saleh, who relocated to Stockholm after leaving Cairo, seems unconcerned with how the Egyptian authorities might take to the film. “My rule for myself is that I don’t care. I have to be consistent about that. Of course, I shouldn’t care if they dislike it, but I shouldn’t care if they like it.” Watching his country under the Sisi regime from afar, unable to return for fear of his own safety, he adds, “I’m Egyptian. I love Egypt, and for me, Egypt is a country of diversity. It breaks my heart.”

He also knows that Egyptians will get a chance to see the film thanks to illegal means. “Piracy is huge in Egypt. So I have a huge audience in Egypt, always a little delayed. They have to wait for cinema release in a major territory, like Great Britain or France.”

While he is grateful for this illicit exposure, he is desperate for the film to play on the big screen in his homeland. “A dream of mine is to have it in a cinema in Egypt,” says Saleh. “There is nothing better than to watch cinema in Egypt, because people are so into film.”

Whether he will realise this dream remains to be seen. The conclusion to his Cairo trilogy, especially in the film’s violent final act, feels like a warning shot, not just about Sisi’s rule but a global shift towards autocracy. “Unfortunately, that is the reality of the world we’re living in. We can joke about Trump, but the consequences of what he’s doing is very, very real for the people that are being crushed and crushed and that’s why we cannot laugh. I think it was a big mistake to laugh and ridicule. I think people should have taken him seriously from the very get-go.”

Eagles of the Republic is in UK cinemas 22 May.