The Eagles of the Republic director on his political satire that is ruffling feathers in EgyptEagles of the Republic: film-maker Tarik Saleh. Photograph: Yigit Eken Tue May 19 2026 - 05:12 • 5 MIN READ‘Ilearned everything from graffiti,” Tarik Saleh tells me. “I owe my whole way of approaching film-making to that. One of the great things you learn in graffiti is: don’t ask for permission; just say you’re sorry afterwards.”Saleh comes from the most fascinating of backgrounds. He is among the era’s sharpest observers of contemporary Egypt. The Nile Hilton Incident, from 2017, hung around a mysterious murder at a posh Cairo hotel. Cairo Conspiracy, winner of best screenplay at Cannes in 2022, followed a young man caught in a tussle between the nation’s religious and political powers. Now, in Eagles of the Republic, he takes on a sprawling political satire that pokes fun at Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, president of the nation since 2014.Yet the director was born and raised in Sweden, where his greatest inspiration was the late Stieg Larsson, author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. He is a hugely respected film director. Yet he began with a spray-paint can.“I learned writing from Stieg Larsson,” Saleh says. “He always said to me, ‘If people knew how fun it was to write, it would be illegal.’ It was a little bit the same with painting. It’s so much fun that I feel guilty doing it. That’s how much I enjoy it.”Son of an Egyptian dad and a Swedish mum, Saleh moved from graffiti to television in the early 1990s. His graphic skills proved useful when making Metropia, his animated-feature debut, from 2009. He was TV host on the Swedish public broadcaster and founded his own production company. You could easily guess you were dealing with a restless polymath from his conversational approach. Speaking in perfect English (he is Swedish, after all), he delivers opinions via a machine-gun monologue. Wind him up and off he goes.“I am very interested in the relationship between truth and lies,” he says. “That where my film-making has always been. My film-making has always been dwelling on the razor edge between reality and fiction. I was reading Hannah Arendt, and she has this amazing insight into authoritarianism. She says the best breeding ground for that is not to have convinced Nazis or communists. It’s when the general population has stopped caring about what’s true and what is a lie.”All of which leads neatly into the complex knot that is Eagles of the Republic. Fares Fares, the director’s regular collaborator, stars as a popular Egyptian actor who is pressed into playing el-Sisi in a film about the 2013 coup against his predecessor Mohamed Morsi. The director explains how, after el-Sisi ascended to the presidency, he seized control of the TV and film industry.Eagles of the Republic: Lyna Khoudri and Fares Fares in Tarik Saleh's film. Photograph: Yigit Eken “They also declared right away that they wanted to do a different kind of film – patriotic films,” he says. “So one of the first big projects was a TV series called Al Ekhteyar, which means The Choice. It’s the journey of el-Sisi to power, right? That, of course, was a highly curated version. It was the propaganda version. In the main role they cast Yasser Galal, who is this tall, handsome actor with long hair on his head. Which was absurd, because el-Sisi looks like me. He’s bald and he’s short.”Saleh, never without a yarn, has something like a personal connection to this school of film-making. We are talking in the English capital.“Every time I come to London there are very strange things happening here,” he says. “It’s as if there are so many people in this city that are here and doing weird things. So I was flown here a year after Cairo Conspiracy by a country that wanted me to do a propaganda TV series. I can’t tell you which country, but I can say it’s a country that you know and that has a lot of power and a lot of money.”We can all have fun guessing where that might have been.Eagles of the Republic fitted comfortably into last year’s Cannes competition alongside such big, serious films as Bi Gan’s Resurrection and Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident. The film has a lot to say. It gets at grim political truths. Wade through Saleh’s extraordinary CV and you come across mainstream projects such as the action thriller The Contractor, with Chris Pine. He knows how to entertain. But he also seems driven by a moral force.“I always ask myself, when I’m going to make a film, could it exist if I don’t make it?” he says. “Because if it could, then someone else should make it. At one point – I think I was in my 20s, which is quite late – my nerves couldn’t deal with the stress of doing graffiti. I was chased through the inside of the subway tunnels in Stockholm. Maybe I was actually 19. I sat up on a platform where I saw the flashlight in front of me, and my heart was almost beating out of my chest. And I was, like, I’m too old for this.”Eagles of the Republic: film-maker Tarik Saleh. Photograph: Yigit Eken Still, you wouldn’t exactly call his Cairo trilogy a safe project. You hardly need to be told that he didn’t make the film in el-Sisi’s Egypt. Cast and crew took themselves to Istanbul after a planned shoot in Morocco fell through at the last moment. But Eagles of the Republic is still ruffling some very influential feathers. I don’t imagine the political establishment will welcome him warmly back to Egypt.“After Nile Hilton they went on television and said they were going to arrest me when I came back,” he says. “They were assuming I was going to come back. And then things got worse in Egypt. It’s not that the country opened up. It became more repressive.”For all his smarts, Saleh will admit he didn’t quite grasp the significance of his artistic choices.“I didn’t think of the consequences,” he says. “Even though my father was trying to remind me of the consequences, I was just ignoring that. I was also thinking, when I finished the first film, who’s going to care? My worry wasn’t that I was going to be banned from Egypt. My biggest worry was that nobody is going to watch this. Ha ha!”He is not much happier about the condition of the United States.“I was in Los Angeles just a week ago,” he says “When we’re in Europe we look at the US and we think, oh my God, it’s Ice officers everywhere; it’s a siege. That wasn’t the feeling. But there’s something infantile, with people standing in line to see Wicked with rainbow drinks in their hands. Labubus hanging from grown-ups. You think, of course they are going to vote for a guy who says he’s going to make America great again.”Saleh is capable of cynicism, but he is clearly at home to hopeful idealism. He wouldn’t keep making this sort of film if he were not.“I get to do exactly the films I want to make,” he says. “The big sacrifice is not going to Egypt. I love that country. But, at the same time, the option of not telling the truth when you make films is just not an option.”Eagles of the Republic is on limited release from Friday, May 22ndIN THIS SECTION