Cinema likes to mess with power.

Not that it despises them on principle.

But if you want to tell about heroes, you have to put great obstacles in their way, and those in power are always those who are powerful.

On the other hand, films financed by media groups, state sponsors and private investors worth millions are always a reflection of the prevailing balance of power.

Cinema can hardly escape this dichotomy of being a medium for the poor and the rich at the same time, even if it targets the most powerful authorities on earth, the state and religion.

But it can make the contradiction fruitful.

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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Boy From Heaven is the fourth feature film by Stockholm-born director Tarik Saleh, who has a Swedish mother and an Egyptian father.

The film, produced with Swedish, French, Finnish and Danish money, is set in Egypt.

Adam, the main character, is a young fisherman who gets a scholarship to the famous Al-Azhar Islamic University in Cairo.

A power struggle is raging there over the successor of the deceased Imam, who is regarded as the head of all Sunni Muslims.

The secret service, which wants to push through a pro-government candidate in the new elections, recruits Adam as an informant.

The young fisherman proves himself, he is just as successful in spying on his friends as he is on the Muslim brothers he is assigned to follow.

Finally, he unmasks a fundamentalist sheikh as a hypocrite, paving the way for the military's favourite.

But Adam's talent for treachery turns against himself. In the end, he lost what no amount of money can buy: his soul.

The film will make an epoch in the Arab world

The pattern according to which "Boy From Heaven" develops its subject is as old as cinema itself. Countless gangster films, policeman films, lawyer films work in the same way.

But Tarik Saleh's competition entry is something fundamentally new, because it shows things that have never been seen in cinemas: an Islamic university as the scene of deadly intrigues, a minaret as a place of threat, a prayer room as the center of a conspiracy.

The film will make an epoch in the Arab world, if only because of the many protests and bans it is likely to trigger.

This is not only due to his anti-Islamist attitude, because "Boy From Heaven" is also a wordless manifesto of the Arab Spring.

The state he shows is no better than the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood,

When cinema fights the battles of yesteryear, it usually looks pretty old.

The story that Mathieu Vadepied's film "Tirailleurs" is dedicated to, the drama of the Senegalese soldiers who fought for the colonial power France in both world wars, has already been adapted for the screen a few times.

Nevertheless, Vadepied takes a new path, because he treats the historical material with the means of mainstream cinema.

The main role in "Tirailleurs" is played by Omar Sy, who became famous for "The Best of Friends" and is now a Hollywood fixture.

Sy embodies the Senegalese Bakary Diallo, who volunteers for military service in World War I after his son Thierno was forcibly recruited by the French.

But his plan

Deserting as soon as possible with Thierno from the trenches back home fails because the son proves himself in his first assignment and is promoted as a reward.

Now he is his father's superior, and this hierarchy is soon put to the test.

“Tirailleurs” cost fourteen million euros, and you can see that sum in the fight scenes.

Alexandre Desplat, the composer of countless soundtracks from "The Queen" to "Shape of Water", has laid a dense carpet of sound over the action, and Luis Armando Arteaga's camera moves effortlessly between barbed wire, shell holes, field kitchens and stage shelters.

The weak point of the film is the script.

Apparently in an effort not to show anything that would upset a mass audience, Vadepied and his co-author Olivier De Mangel constructed a handbrake-on descent into hell.

“Tirailleurs” doesn't come close to doing justice to the horrors of World War I, and it doesn't expand the historical framework far enough, because you get to see almost nothing of what awaits the survivors of the carnage in France and Senegal.

The father-son drama remains.

But a peculiarity of French cinema shows through here: instead of taking family conflicts to the extreme, as Bergman or Fassbinder did, it prefers to moderate them.

It's clear that one of them will sacrifice himself for the other, but the way it's done seems almost dutiful.

With a sure eye for the difference in ranking, the Cannes selection jury put “Tirailleurs” as the opening film in the side series “Un certain regard”.

There are films that play around with the rules of cinema a bit, and others that change them.

Every year they meet in Cannes.