The class injustice that sparked the recent revolt in Egypt plays out in steamy microcosm in a film that—while it verges occasionally on melodrama—picks at some incredibly taboo scars in Middle Eastern society.

Gorgeous young Fatma (Nahed El Sebai) is a hard-working farm labourer reduced to marrying an elderly but kind man. But when her former lover shows up at the grounds to live and work, she begins a forbidden affair. Hovering around ominously is the farm owner, an unhappy old rich guy who frets at his adult children’s dabblings in the protests to overthrow Hosni Mubarak. What his kids clearly don’t get is that their own cushy lifestyle rests on their father’s exploitation of the poor—an exploitation that takes on a truly sinister dimension as the story progresses. A film as fearless about sexual passion as it is about ripping the modern-day slavery that fuels the establishment—and patriarchy—in Egypt.