My all-time favorite film festival experience: the gamble that pays off in a jackpot, the hunch for a film outside the buzzstream that turns out to be a pick of the fest. This one was a long shot — three hours long, an entire afternoon I could have spent watching two other films (or a Bears game, actually; see rating scale). But perhaps I can communicate my enthusiasm and get the complete attention of at least certain filmgoers quickly this way: think of it as an Arabic Best of Youth. Okay, the analogy's not perfect. Only half as long, covering a much shorter time span, but like that immensely popular Italian historical epic, this film tells through richly-realized individual stories the story of an era. Furthermore, the era is not one of decades past, remembered through a nostalgic haze, but a time of convulsive transition upon us now, affecting all of us now and for the foreseeable future.

Rookie director Marwan Harnad pulls off here an amazing adaptation of a complex, all-time best-selling Arabic novel like it was his twentieth film, not his first. Harnad likes his dolly and crane (maybe a tad too much so), and he sweeps us into the lives of a dozen characters across contemporary Egyptian social, economic and political strata with an irresistible buoyancy and charm. For like Kieslowski's storied apartment bloc, Cairo's Yacoubian Building, holds many intertwining narratives, and is itself a symbol of recent Egyptian history. Rising with the modern Egyptian monarchy, the Yacoubian has seen clientele adjusting downward with national fortunes. Yet the still-dignified ruin remains home to a cross-section of a stratified, if decayed, society. The faded aristocrat, or Pasha. The homosexual aesthete. The self-made merchant, who keeps a store on the ground floor. The poor squatters on the rooftop, including Bosaina, a young woman who since her father's death must work to support the family — and so subject herself to the sexual humiliation and hypocrisy the film suggests is woven tightly into a corrupt, predatory society.

Indeed, the dominant modes of relation seem to be rape and whoredom: kept women, kept men, insatiable lusts, desperate prostitutes who submit to survive (and try to get back what they can any way they can), victimizers who become victims and vice-versa. This whirling vortex of corruption, hypocrisy, exploitation, poverty and humiliation can only drain to one place — the one you can see coming a mile away — the only available moral authority, the radical Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Taha, son of the Yacoubian doorman, finds his ambitions checked in every direction but the mosque, where he is mentored by a radical sheikh, and led into a sadly now-predictable direction. Whenever I get a look at the socio-economic-political-religious forces driving the creation of terrorists, I feel like turning away in horror like Roy Scheider in Jaws when he says "We're gonna need a bigger boat." Or, in our case, a bigger vision, bigger than thinking "they hate us for our freedom." This film makes clear that moralistic sloganeering and crazed application of violence will only add power to the vortex. (When Taha is arrested for protesting against the government, he gets from the police what can apparently now be called "the American treatment" — ala The Shield, Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, etc: of course it only pushes him over the edge.)

Yet despite the bleakness of this vision, this is an uplifting film, if only because of the sheer artistry of getting us so far into all these stories and leaving us with a broader, more human view of their — and thus our — situation. The performances are uniformly terrific, the characters, even amid reprehensible choices, are multi-dimensional and human. The music is an appropriately epic background of Western orchestrations with Eastern accents. The director's own orchestration of all these elements is so masterful as to give one that best hope of art, that perhaps some satisfying harmony of humanity and goodness, beauty and truth may yet exist, and may even occassionally be glimpsed outside of art, in life.