Hamdy El Sakhawy
This production is a light hearted comedy. The protagonist is an esteemed cartoonist that works at a news firm. The protagonist undergoes a difficult situation and emerges partly wounded. Following this experience he insists on going back to work but something about him has changed – he lets go of some of his upstanding principles to become “respectable less one quarter”
Cairo: a 70-year-old building of once-luxury flats with tenements on the roof. Zika, an aging libertine, feuds with his sister. Pius Haj Azzam takes a second wife, in secret, to satisfy sexual drive within religious bounds. Bothayna, poor and beautiful, supports her family, wanting to do so with dignity intact. Her former fiancé, Taha, the janitor's son, humiliated by the police, turns to fundamentalism. Hatem, a gay editor, seduces and corrupts a young man from the sticks. Two brothers, Copts, one a tailor and one Zika's factotum, connive for property. Allah is on most everyone's lips, and corruption is in their hearts.
Principal Ashour runs his school with severity and cruelty. After his death, his son Salah inherits the school and faces a lot of troubles in managing it.
Khalaf, a bumpkin southern Egyptian wins a scholarship to study at the American University in Cairo where students -- many from Cairo's upper class -- are known for their Americanized attitudes.
