Directed by Claire Billet, Nadia Blétry • Documentary • With François Hollande, Maye Kabil, Ariane Lavrilleux, Ahmed Abdel Quddus • 2026 • 53 minutes
To an outsider, Egypt looks like a dynamic country reinventing itself. Under president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, construction is booming, with dams, bridges, roads, and tourism mega-projects proliferating in the desert and along the Mediterranean coast.
But behind the flashy projects, Egypt is a country on the brink of collapse. Egypt is now the third most indebted country in the world, its economy largely dependent on income from the Suez Canal and tourism. And those mega-projects? They are propped up by support from the Gulf states, the IMF and the European Union — and ultimately will be sold off to foreign investors.
In EL-SISI: EGYPT'S NEW PHARAOH, the directors speak with regular Egyptians struggling to make ends meet, political dissidents, and social and economic experts, revealing a country where poverty abounds, criticism is not tolerated, and the military has infiltrated almost every sector of the economy. Is the land of the pyramids modernizing — or do Egypt’s changes represent just another pyramid scheme?
Up Next in New: Documentaries
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The Luck of Water
Directed by Ignacio Decerega, Cristóbal Jasso • Documentary • 2023 • 64 minutes
The Luck of Water profiles two rivers and a sacred saltwater lagoon system in the indigenous Mixtec, mestizo, and Afro-descendant communities in the Oaxaca’s coastal region in Mexico. For indigenous Mixtec communitie...
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Looking for Robert
Directed by Richard Copans • Documentary • With Robert Kramer • 2025 • 74 minutes
Robert Kramer’s politics were as a radical as his approach to making films. A founder of the leftist Newsreel collective, he went on to direct documentaries and dramas, and films that blended both. Disgusted with t...
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Relentless Memory
Directed by Paula Rodríguez Sickert • Documentary • 2024 • 93 minutes
Margarita, a Mapuche academic, discovers in an unknown archive in Berlin the testimonies of Mapuche prisoners who were expelled from their territories during the military invasions that founded Argentina and Chile. Moved by th...
