Nasrallah is a protégé of Egypt's finest directors, Youssef Chahine and the late Shadi Abdelsalam, and in his sophistication and maturity is already their peer. His film, evidently full of autobiographical reminiscence, is a portrait-sometimes Chekhovian, sometimes with a touch of Satyajit Ray-of a middle-class family in the years from Nasser's revolution to the upheavals of the 1980s. In this family chronicle, comedy and tragedy, life and death flow by as inevitably as the river beside which the clan lives. It is a society in which everything and nothing changes. At the center of it all is the troubled, passionate, touching friendship of two boys from different classes, growing from childhood to adult life that separates their ways. "The Tower of Babel lunches, the anguish of the 'adults' while listening to Nasser's speech of July 26...and above all: desire. It is all true," says Nasrallah. "The large house where we spent our summer holidays is now just a pile of dust... And even the donkeys have disappeared. Summersaults was born of my return to a country that I had not seen for twenty years." David Robinson, London