The Nile Hilton Incident

In Cairo, weeks before the 2011 revolution, Police Detective Noredin is working in the infamous Kasr el-Nil Police Station when he is handed the case of a murdered singer.

Upon realizing the involvement of Egypt’s power elite in the case, Noredin slowly changes sides to those who are defenceless against it.

A political thriller based on a true story.

Winner Sundance 2017 World Cinema Grand Jury Prize

Winner 5 Swedish Films Awards at the Guldbagge 2018

Nominated Cesars for Best Foreign Language Film 2018

Week Commencing 2nd March 2018

Tarik Saleh was born 1972 in Stockholm.  He and Kristina Åberg are two of the founders of Atmo.  His most recent film, TOMMY (2014), was a thriller featuring Moa Gammel, Ola Rapace, and singer/songwriter Lykke Li.  Saleh directed and co-wrote METROPIA (2009 Venice International Film Festival), featuring Vincent Gallo, Juliette Lewis, and Stellan Skarsgård, and he has directed award-winning documentaries, such as GITMO.  Saleh produced the music video I Follow Rivers for Lykke Li, which has had nearly 60 million YouTube views.

Filmography

Tommy (2014)
Metropia (2009)
Gitmo - New Rules of War (2005)
Sacrificio (2001)

★★★★

'A cracking Cairo thriller.'

Simran Hans, THE OBSERVER

★★★★

'Corruption seeps into every pore of Egyptian society in Tarik Saleh’s impressive thriller.

This is a political thriller which takes its inspiration from Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. The convulsions elsewhere in the Middle East, for example in nearby Tunisia, are of no interest to Noredin, played in wonderfully lugubrious and fatalistic fashion by the imposing Fares, who seems at times like an Egyptian Philip Marlowe.

It manages the feat of remaining a moody and atmospheric private eye-style mystery while offering more insight into the final days of Mubarak’s presidency than any didactic, self-righteous documentary could ever manage.'

Geoffrey Macnab, THE INDEPENDENT

'Calls to mind not only the American thrillers of the 1940's but also some of their more recent inheritors: the hallucinatory conspiracy fantasies of David Lynch, and the webs of misogyny, murder and courruption slowly detangled in Scandinavian TV series such as The Killing and The Bridge.'

Hannah McGill, SIGHT & SOUND

★★★★

★★★★

'...has the twistiness and nihilism of an Egyptian Chinatown...Saleh's film works not only as a thrilling murder-mystery and morality tale, but as a commentary on a country in the edge of revolution.'

Olly Richards, EMPIRE

★★★★

'A genuinely thrilling neo-noir'

Linda Marric, HEYUGUYS

★★★★

'Haggard cops, hotel homicides, endless ciggies...Helmer Taril Saleh makes 2011 Cairo noir-ish, in a stylishly pungent, politically loaded procedural.'

Kevin Harley, TOTAL FILM

'[The Nile Hilton Incident)…like Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan, charts one man’s deluded attempt to do the right thing in a world where money and power are the only moral arbiters.'

'Like the finest noir, what springs forth from Saleh’s film is the dreary belief that the bad sleep well while the rest are left to suffer in the streets.'
SCREEN DAILY

'Pierre Aim’s prowling camera unpeels the city’s layers of physical and moral decay in muted, contrasting tones that intermittently highlight sudden, bloody bursts of violence...'

VARIETY

'The Nile Hilton Incident represents the type of penetrating filmmaking that only a writer-director intimately familiar with Egyptian culture but possessing an outsider’s perspective could convincingly accomplish.'

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

'The Nile Hilton Incident darkly unfolds like the very best of Graham Greene — did I mention Carol Reed’s The Third Man is my all-time favorite film? — but goes Greene one better.'

'Masterfully shot by Pierre Aïm, the thriller benefits immensely from a harrowing rhythm established by Theis Schmidt’s angry editing ...Obviously [it is] well on its way to becoming a festival, critic and audience darling.'

'The French Connection, Heat and Jean-Pierre Melville are all there in the mix...Brilliant.'

FILMMAKER MAGAZINE

'Beautiful film, dark, precise, burning, mixing suspense and politics.'

LE MONDE

'Twice in a row the first film I’ve seen at Sundance is so brilliant, so accomplished that I start Sundance on a mountain high — and it’s not the thin air.'

LE FIGARO

For film bookings please contact Colin Burch at Verve Pictures — [email protected]. Press resources are on the Press page.