Karnak

Ismail, Zainab and Helmy are classmates at university. The years are the nineteen sixties and the place is Egypt. All three are living an ordinary student life. Then one day they are taken into custody. They are interrogated and they are tortured. The film says this without detail and without hiding it. The intelligence apparatus of the period sits at the centre of the story. The pressure does not stay inside the prison. It follows them once they are out as well. The bond between the three of them takes its share of the damage. Who said what becomes a matter of its own. The film is adapted from the novel of the same name by Naguib Mahfouz. It counts among the openly political productions of Egyptian cinema. Soad Hosny and Nour El-Sherif appear in the hundred and forty minute film, an Egyptian production Ali Badrakhan finished in 1975.