Poisonous Roses

Saqr (22) wants to flee from the grubby Egyptian tanners’ district where he lives and works. His sister, Taheya (28), wants to prevent this at all costs. She sabotages the blossoming romance between her brother and a medical student and also tries to thwart Saqr’s future plans as a boat refugee in Italy.
Every day she brings Saqr freshly prepared lunch, implying that without her care he shall starve. We follow her in her hijab along the open sewer in which blue wastewater flows from the district, down claustrophobic alleyways where hardly any sunlight penetrates.
Among the dried skins and punch-drunk mules, a shaman silently watches from his improvised throne. He is to help Taheya with an occult solution in this intriguing, skittish portrait of poverty in today’s Egypt. With phenomenal shots of the towering scaffolding of a glue factory, juxtaposed with moving scenes in which the everlasting love between brothers and sisters prevails.