I was convinced that Mohamed Ramadan, ever since his television series debut, would become a star like the legendary Ahmed Zaki. However, his artistic shifts away from drama before his return with the film "Asad" influenced my opinion of him, and I hesitated to go to the cinema to see it on the first day of Eid.

But in the end, I went, and these were my impressions:

Films that rely on eliciting the viewer's sympathy and tears from beginning to end are artistically weak, even if their stars are talented and well-known.

Adapting from history must be done cautiously and purposefully, which is what this film lacked, in my opinion. The film's events take place in the 19th century (Egypt 1840), and we didn't study this atrocity in our schooling—the slave market (the slave trade) in Egypt during that era.

The film's bright spot is that it gave ample space to Arab artists (from the Levant and Sudan) as part of the existing social fabric in Egypt today. The show I attended, despite being at a time considered prime for movie theaters (8:15 pm), had no more than 15 people inside the cinema.