Ahmed Mourad is a writer who could also be described as the Egyptian Joom Nesbo, a popular author of crime stories, and Marwan Hamed is a local director who has been making films exclusively based on Mourad’s novels in recent years. “Diamond Dust” was the biggest success so far for this duo and this crime mystery – the thriller was a big hit in Egypt. However, just like in the vast majority of similar crime stories, no matter where you come from, the story here is quite stretched and not particularly convincing, so that even the apparently high-quality production conditions did not manage to raise this film much above average. “Diamond Dust” could be described in the shortest terms as an Egyptian answer to Hitchcock’s “Window to the Yard”, but it is not one of those classic and irritating rewrites, but the legendary classic partly served as inspiration for Mourad and Hamed.
Although “Diamond Dust” is stylistically and technically modeled after Anglo-American films of the same genre, the strongest asset of this film is the authentic Egyptian socio-political background. Regardless of the fact that the action of the film takes place in the present (that is, in 2012, when the novel was published), the trigger for everything is largely events from the past. This is how we briefly learn the historical circumstances from the beginning of the fifties when the monarchy was overthrown by a military coup and how the first president Mohamed Naguib tried to introduce real democracy in Egypt, only to be overthrown by his companion Gamal Abdel Nasser in a new military coup and he became the long-term dictator of this North African country. .
In those turbulent times, the father of the film’s main protagonist, Taha, grew up working in a pharmacy in Cairo who leads a seemingly average and ordinary life. His father is a retired history teacher who has been paralyzed for decades, and looking out the apartment window is one of his hobbies. Until one day, for unknown reasons, someone kills him in the apartment, and Taha then finds his father’s diary, from which he will find out who his father really was and what diamond dust actually is, and what the old man has been doing with it since childhood. We will understand that the old man was not exactly an ordinary harmless uncle, but it is still unclear why someone would kill him until Taha realizes that the father got involved in dangerous activities and saw some powerful people doing something that should not have been seen .
Thus, Taha will also find himself in danger and become entangled in dangerous political intrigues, and it will soon become clear to him that some extremely powerful people are involved in his father’s murder. Although in principle the story is even relatively interesting, very quickly it gets scattered on several sides, it becomes unnecessarily complicated, so the film lasts a good two and a half hours. Also somewhat problematic for me were the somewhat old-fashioned acting and direction, as if it was a film that was shot sometime in the sixties, although it is clear from the photography and the environment that it takes place in the present. However, those who like crime and thrillers probably shouldn’t go wrong with this exotic genre offshoot.