He wants to be a police officer but finds he has no contacts to help him into the profession so turns to fundamentalism and becomes a terrorist. The Yacoubian Building is an actual 10-storey Art Deco apartment block in downtown Cairo, built in 1937 by an Armenian entrepreneur. There is also a young woman who is forced to support her family by giving sexual favours to her boss, who owns the shops on the building’s ground floor and there is the educated and idealistic son of the porter. The Yacoubian Building presents police torture as a main cause of Islamic extremism shows sexual exploitation of poor women at the workplace prostitution. The main stories focus on an elderly, womanising pasha an ex-shoeshine boy turned drug dealer, who is trying to buy himself a place in politics and a gay journalist working for a French language newspaper. Our flats were given away to army officers and they sold them on. Like thousands of other Egyptian Jews, my family was expelled from Egypt by Gamal Abdel Nasser in the same year. It is a glimpse of what became of the Egypt we left behind after the Suez crisis in 1956. The film opens in sepia colour with a shot of Egyptian Jews scrambling down the stairs with suitcases. Like Mahfouz’s novel and like Aswany’s best-known work, The Yacoubian Building The Republic of False Truths is a panoramic fiction with a large cast of characters: generals. Set in the early 1990s, it tells the story of the inhabitants of a faded art deco building in the centre of Cairo (its namesake still stands). A line drawing of the Internet Archive headquarters building façade.

The yacoubian building