Adam, the son of a modest fishing family, receives a scholarship from a local imam to study at the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo. When he arrives at the school, he is overwhelmed by the discipline, the rigour, and the pious atmosphere, and he is also confused when a fellow student offers him a cigarette and initiates him into the city’s nightlife. Soon the supportive imam dies, which marks the beginning of a brutal power struggle to take his place. The secular and religious sides start looking at one another with increasing suspicion.

Boy From Heaven is an intriguing mix of contempt, criticism, and paranoia by Tarik Saleh, the Swedish-Egyptian director behind the award-winning film The Nile Hilton Incident (2017). This film, which won Best Screenplay at Cannes, veers into spy thriller territory, as did the screenplay for the director’s previous work that ended up being banned in Egypt. It is a tale of church and state corruption, rather unusually set in the Islamic world, that could have been written by John le Carré himself. The difference here is that instead of “moles” you have “angels”.