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Mo is a young boy growing up in a traditional Egyptian household, but beyond the front door of the family’s modest London flat is a completely different world – the streets of Hackney. The impressionable Mo idolizes his handsome older brother Rashid and wants to follow is his footsteps. However, Rashid, a charismatic and shrewd member of a local gang, wants a different life for his little brother and deals drugs hoping to put Mo through college. One eventful summer, Rashid’s sexual awakening forces Mo to confront his own fears and phobias and threatens to tear the brothers apart. Director Sally El Hosaini stops by to talk about her beautifully rendered feature film debut.

“A tender, bracing fraternal drama of London’s gang life, the immigrant experience, and questions no smaller than what “manhood” might mean to young men whose traditional cultures are colliding with the worst-and the best-of the secular west.” – Alan Scherstuhl, Village Voice

Nuances of faith, politics and sexual identity enrich what initially presents as a classic good son-bad son tale, and although the film’s melting-pot patois is occasionally too dense to decipher, we get the gist.” – Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times