First time in the Middle East for a contented American working wife, now facing Empty Nest Syndrome with two children flown, planning to meet up with her husband in Cairo to see the pyramids together. The husband, a United Nations emissary overseeing a refugee camp in Gaza, is detained incommunicado in circumstances of uncertain danger, and in his stead he has dispatched a former employee of his, a native Egyptian who in retirement has inherited his father’s coffee shop (best coffee in the world if he says so himself), to look after the woman in the meantime, show her around, keep her company. As the days stretch out indefinitely, with attendant loss of bearings, a bond forms between them and ever so imperceptibly tightens. You can see how it would happen. You can believe it implicitly. In time, a slight infidelity will be committed (those pyramids won’t wait forever), but how great a one is open for discussion, although apparently not open for it between reunited spouses. In synopsis it sounds like nothing. In actual experience it feels like one of the foremost things the cinema was made for, taking us away, setting us down, putting us deeply into a scene — an exotic scene for extra measure — with a knowledgeable, alert, sensitive, and subtle eye to guide us. Written and directed with consummate skill and invisible effort by the Arab-Canadian Ruba Nadda, it combines, and completely merges, the quite separate attractions of the travelogue and the tearjerker. With Patricia Clarkson, Alexander Siddig, Tom McCamus, Amina Annabi, Elena Anaya. (2010) — Duncan Shepherd