Eagles of the Republic: Egypt’s film industry becomes a political battleground in Tarik Saleh’s sharp thriller

The concluding chapter of Swedish-Egyptian filmmaker Tarik Saleh’s Cairo trilogy, a series of political thrillers set in present-day Egypt, was always bound to be the most contentious. The Nile Hilton Incident (2017) probed the systemic corruption of the country’s security apparatus on the eve of the 2011 revolution, part of the Arab Spring; Cairo Conspiracy (2022) explored the inextricable relationship between the religious establishment and the nation’s military intelligence services.

Eagles of the Republic turns its gaze to what may be the country’s last sacred institution: the film industry. Saleh’s regular star, the Lebanese-Swedish actor Fares Fares, plays George Fahmy, Egypt’s most bankable film star (the “Pharaoh of the Screen”), whose flourishing career appears untouched by his numerous extramarital affairs or his status as a member of the Christian minority.

Though not an outspoken affiliate of Egypt’s feeble liberal opposition, Fahmy has distanced himself from incumbent president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, whose despotic rule extinguished the democratic aspirations of the 2011 revolution. Like many of the country’s popular entertainers, Fahmy is enlisted by the regime to participate in one of the many productions financed by sprawling state-owned enterprises, this one designed to glorify its towering leader.

From the outset, Fahmy realises he has little choice but to collaborate if he wishes to preserve his luxurious life in Egypt. He fancies himself a Trotskyist, but he is too vain and licentious to commit to any political ideology and too self-serving to pursue a freer, if less opulent, existence outside the country for himself, his teenage son and his estranged wife.

Under the watchful eye of army generals – the ‘Eagles of the Republic’ – Fahmy struggles to maintain his artistic integrity, repeatedly clashing with a crude and oppressively controlling system shaped by the conservative, lower-middle-class ethos of its leader.

The film’s first half ranks among Saleh’s strongest work to date, vividly capturing the frustrations and disorientation of a vibrant industry buckling under unprecedented censorship. Some English-language critics have labelled Eagles a satire. For Egyptian and Arab viewers, however, the real-life parallels Saleh evokes are too precise, too uncomfortably close to inspire any critical distance. The fictional Sisi biopic echoes the widely watched television series El Ekhteyar (‘The Choice’, 2020-22), the third season of which featured a popular actor portraying the president. Likewise, the production company depicted in Eagles closely resembles United Media Services, the military intelligence-run conglomerate that until recently maintained a near-monopoly over Egyptian film and television.

Fahmy’s predicament draws on numerous well-documented accounts of actors pressured by the regime to participate in propaganda projects or risk professional exile. The climactic speech he is compelled to deliver in front of Sisi recalls real-life instances of prominent stars publicly extolling the president during national celebrations, a tradition that dates back to the era of President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Not everything in Eagles adheres closely to contemporary Egyptian reality. Shot in Turkey, Saleh’s Cairo feels like an outdated vision of a city that has undergone rapid transformation under Sisi’s neoliberal policies. The dialogue, too, often rings false: Cherien Dabis as a persecuted actress who is Fahmy’s friend and Lyna Khoudri as Fahmy’s young mistress both deliver among the worst approximations of the Egyptian dialect ever put on screen.

The cast brings together a who’s who of Egypt’s exiled talent, most notably a brilliantly commanding, steely-eyed Amr Waked as producer and Sisi aide Dr Mansour, and Hesham Abdel Hamid in a brief turn as an army general.

Eagles emerges unmistakably as a work of dissent: an angry portrait of an industry exploited and deformed by a regime determined to preserve its power. The hollow religiosity underpinning the censorship appears all the more hypocritical when set against the regime’s Machiavellian reliance on violence and repression.

But the film’s lack of a clear historical framework leaves viewers unfamiliar with Egypt’s post-2011 political landscape grappling with significant narrative gaps; and the entertaining but superfluous twists of the final act strain credulity, pushing the film into treacherous political terrain more effectively explored in the first two parts of the trilogy.

Although Eagles of the Republic was largely ignored by the ruling regime and vehemently attacked by local critics, the arrest by Egyptian authorities last December of Swedish-Egyptian actor Hassan El Sayed, who has a small part, lends it an eerie real-world resonance. While economic pressures and shifting regional geopolitics have compelled the regime to loosen its grip on the country’s vast entertainment industry, Eagles of the Republic ultimately suggests that truly unfettered filmmaking will always pose a profound threat to autocratic power.

► Eagles of the Republic is in UK cinemas 22 May.