Star of August

A piercing portrait of the Egyptian nation in upheaval in the 1960s—and a powerful critique of progress made at a human cost.

In the summer of 1965, a journalist newly released from prison finds himself stranded at the sprawling site of the Aswan High Dam, the flagship project of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s modern Egypt. Amid oppressive heat, unreliable transport, a mysterious epidemic, and the oppressive gaze of state surveillance, he confronts a dramatic transformation underway: villages erased,...