Cairo Time

Year: 2009

Actors: Elena Anaya, Patricia Clarkson, Alexander Siddig

Duration: 90 min

Magazine editor Juliette Grant arrives in Cairo for her first ever trip to the Middle East, it a vacation where she will meet with her husband Mark Laroche, a UN official who is working at a refugee camp in Gaza. Instead of being met by Mark at the airport, she is met by Tareq Khalifa, who was Mark's longtime security guard at the UN, but who recently retired from that job to open a café in Cairo. Tareq did this favor of picking up Juliette for Mark, who is detained at the camp on some major but non-life threatening problem. As she is left to her own devices in Cairo waiting for Mark, the two who promised to do many of the major sites together, Juliette finds that she is a fish out of water, especially as a very white woman knowing no Arabic traveling alone in what is a patriarchal society. As such, she ends up relying on Tareq more than she anticipated, he who is more than happy to do her and by association his friend Mark these favors. As Juliette and Tareq spend more and more time together, which includes Juliette counseling him on his love life especially with regard to a former flame named Yasmeen, both Juliette and Tareq find more unexpected issues arising between the two.—Huggo

Genre: Drama   Romance