Winner of the Best Screenplay award at this year’s Cannes, this gripping, labyrinthine thriller takes in the corruption and paranoia of Egypt’s religious and political elite.

An explosive thriller that speaks truth to power, the latest from acclaimed filmmaker Tarik Saleh (The Nile Hilton Incident, MIFF 2017; Metropia, MIFF 2009) tackles the corruption, hypocrisy and tangled intrigue of Egypt’s religious establishment. Adam (Tawfeek Barhom, The Idol, Mary Magdalene), a young man from a rural fishing village, receives a grant to study at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, renowned as the most prestigious Islamic educational institution in the world. Arriving just after the sudden death of the campus’s Grand Imam, he rapidly becomes a pawn in a power struggle between competing ideological factions at the highest level.

Egyptian-born, Sweden-based Saleh delivers a richly compelling film that mixes the espionage action of John Le Carré with a righteous, confrontational satire on the corruption of mosque and state. Zipping onto the screen with skilful, flinty-eyed performances from Barhom and Fares Fares (Rogue One, Zero Dark Thirty) as the shady state security agent playing cat-and-mouse with the harried pupil, Boy From Heaven is bold, urgent and extremely entertaining.

“An intriguing mix of scorn and paranoia … A superbly realised paranoid nightmare.” – The Guardian