This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Privacy Overview
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
3rd Party Cookies
This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!
Director's Statement
The film is about the past and the future colliding, and the people that get crushed in between. My grandfather was a student at Al-Azhar, he was one of the first from his village to get a formal education. He told me that the Sheikh Al-Azhar said - after visiting Paris for the first time - “I went to France and I saw Islam without Muslims; I came back to Egypt to see Muslims without Islam.” This statement would be impossible for him to make today. As an artist, I see my job to be truthful in my work, no matter what the consequences are. I am in this unique place that has doors into several worlds. I could open a door and sit with my uncle in Egypt and talk about what God thinks about masturbation, then step into another room to see my grandmother jump into a lake in the Swedish archipelago, naked. The most interesting thing to me is not to see how misinformed people are about other cultures, but how totally self-deceptive we are about our own culture. I see the similarities rather than the differences. I am interested in taking the spectator with me into a Pandora’s box. A world within a world that has never been visited by a camera. The film is about the conflict of ideas and ideology. I always had a fascination with the university, and its history. I have never seen a film about Islam that just is – there is always a statement, pro or against… I want to see a film which is without judgement or blinkers. I want to take the audience on a journey. It’s not one of those tours where you never leave the bus – here we make stops, eat the local food, and get sick from it. Adam is our guide – a student. He will learn the art of power, the beauty of deception and the ugliness of the truth. My fiction constantly crashes with reality. At times it scares me, but to be honest, that is why I do this: to make my dreams come true. I see myself in the context of a larger movement where people like Alejandro González Iñárritu, Mohsin Hamid, Asghar Farhadi and Bong Joon-ho have paved the way to storytelling that forces the audience to reverse their gaze.