Diamond Dust

Taha (Asser Yassin) is a middle-class pharmacist leading a solitary existence while caring for his disabled father, a former history teacher. His life is turned upside down when his father is suddenly and mysteriously murdered, prompting an obsessive quest to uncover his father’s dark past – one linked to an underground organisation with a dubious mission.

For their third consecutive collaboration, Marwan Hamed adapted Ahmed Mourad’s 2010 best-selling novel of the same name – another major commercial success for the pair. Their now-established trademarks of secret networks and dangerous substances are front and centre in the narrative.

The result is part murder mystery, part revenge thriller and part psychological neo-noir. Diamond Dust is an inquiry into the elusiveness of justice, the suffocating banality of middle-class life, the intergenerational inheritance of violence and the ambiguity of morality – a recurring theme in both Hamed’s and Mourad’s work. Beneath this dark genre piece lies a subtle commentary on the legitimacy of taking the law into one’s own hands in a lawless nation plagued by institutional corruption.

– Joseph Fahim