A luxury-apartment building in central Cairo teems with tragicomic intrigue in this ambitious film. Residents of the building — built in the '30s to house the city's upper crust and now chock-a-block with denizens of all backgrounds and rank—careen through one another's daily dramas over three, leisurely yet tumultuous, hours. We meet a panoply of Yacoubian inhabitants: a former aristocrat; the son of the building doorman, a disillusioned young woman, a flamboyantly gay newspaper editor, a dashing soldier and a successful businessman. These and other memorable characters fatefully cross paths in a social milieu still straitjacketed by political corruption, fundamentalism, prostitution, patriarchal chauvinism, police brutality and religious hypocrisy. Taking on topics that are still taboo in much of his country, Hamed masterfully helms this sprawling epic, the biggest-budget Egyptian _lm to date, and directs a brilliant ensemble cast featuring many illustrious veterans of Arab cinema.