We are pleased to inform you that the delay we were experiencing with the shipment of Eye of The Sun has been resolved, and a screening of the film has been scheduled for Saturday, June 25 at 7pm. Tickets are on sale now at TIFF Bell Lightbox and online. We appreciate your continued patience and hope you enjoy the film.

“Eye of the Sun” is the literal translation of Ein Shams, once the Egyptian capital during the Pharaonic era and now one of Cairo’s poorest and most neglected neighbourhoods. Ibrahim El Batout’s renegade, low-budget indie, structured around a series of intersecting stories and characters, depicts the hardships of everyday survival in Ein Shams with both humility and spontaneity. There is eleven-year-old Shams, a precocious girl diagnosed with cancer whose parents cannot afford her medical treatments; a group of talented young men with no prospects for jobs or careers; tirelessly corrupt politicians and thriving drug gangs; the daunting avian flu epidemic and violent policing of political dissent. Arousing much furor in the Egyptian film establishment due to its uncompromising directness and honesty—El Batout had avoided seeking permissions for fear that his script would be censored—Eye of the Sun marked a bold return to the neorealist style of Egypt’s master filmmakers of the 1960s and was the first independent film to get a limited release in Egyptian theatres, a breakthrough for the country’s emerging generation of auteurs.