Thartharah fawqa al-Nīl

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Thartharah fawqa al-Nīl (Arabic: ثرثرة فوق النيل) (Adrift on the Nile) is a film based on the novel by Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz.

[edit] Plot

The film addresses the decadence of Egyptian society during the Gamal Abdel Nasser era.

It tells the story of a simple Egyptian worker, Anis (played by Emad Hamadi), who can't tolerate the hypocrisy of the Egyptian government and the illiteracy of the Egyptian public and decides to hide from all the problems in the country by simply taking shisha, a popular smoking habit in Egypt, to escape from reality.

Anis (who used to work as a teacher) meets with an old student, Ragab (actor Ahmed Ramzi), by chance. Ragab invites him to the small boat in the Nile. And Anis discovers soon enough that he isn't the only person who smokes shisha but a bunch of other elite , middle class and low class people are all on the boat. He soon discovers that everyone is smoking to forget the reality and hypocrisy of Egyptian life.

At the end of the movie, Anis decides to stop smoking shisha and so stop taking drugs. But soon he is left alone in the street as a crazy person not because he was actually crazy but because you can't wake up a lot of people who are stoned which is almost everyone in egypt.

[edit] Political background

The film was released during the era of Anwar Al Sadat the former President of Egypt, winner of Nobel Peace Prize, and was taken quickly from the market because the film was seen as a criticism of the Gamal Abdel Nasser socialism period, and the oppression of artistic films during Nasser's