Egyptian director Omar Hilal, who made a splash with breakout hit “Voy! Voy! Voy!,” is back behind the camera with “His Weakest Creatures.” The Cairo-set feature marks the first pairing between Hend Sabri and Ahmed Helmy, who are two of the Arab world’s most bankable stars.

In “His Weakest Creatures,” Helmy — known locally for popular comedies such as “Wahed Tany” and “X-Large” — will play a principled zoologist who works in Cairo’s Giza Zoo in 2007, during a time when it had fallen into disrepair. He will face a moral crisis when a wealthy visitor offers to “adopt” animals.

Sabri, who leads Netflix’s Arab original “Finding Ola” and recently appeared in Kaouther Ben Hania’s Oscar-nominated “Four Daughters,” plays the zoologist’s wife and mother of their children, who must navigate the strain of their modest income combined with another unexpected and unwanted pregnancy.

Below, Hilal — who launched “Voy! Voy! Voy!” in 2022 from the Red Sea Film Festival — speaks with* Variety* from the set of his new film, which he says will create an analogy between Cairo’s crumbling zoo and the city’s dwindling middle class.

How did the story originate?

This is a very personal film. Number one, I absolutely adore animals. Basically, if I couldn’t be a director, I’d be a zoologist. I grew up in a house that loves all kinds of animals. And all of my youth, while traveling around Europe, America or wherever we went, we always went to the zoo. So it’s a very important topic for me. And unfortunately, in Egypt we need to do much more about loving our animals.

Tell me more.

Besides that, it’s also a story about Egypt’s middle class. It’s about a middle-class man living in Cairo’s Maadi neighbourhood, which is where I live, by the way. Maadi is sort of on its last legs because everybody in Cairo is moving out to new compounds and suburbs. The place still manages to reflect the people who are living there. But what happened is that, with a lot of economic strife, a lot of these people who used to be affluent have dropped down a few notches [on the social ladder] because they don’t have the money to keep up with the fast-moving wealth of people who are returning from the Gulf or Europe. Some people fell through through the cracks. So “His Weakest Creatures” is a story about such a man. It’s the story of a zoologist [played by Helmy] who is struggling at home, and his home struggle is mirrored in the zoo’s struggle. Because this zoo used to be a wonder. It used to be called the “Jewel of Africa,” and it has deteriorated over time. Luckily it’s now going through a renovation, which we are all very excited about.

**How were you able to put Hend Sabri and Ahmed Helmy on screen together for the first time? **

I’m thanking my lucky stars that these two giants in our world have decided to join this film. They both have this unbelievable chameleon-like quality. They blend into the skin of their characters so well. And I needed real people. You know, a lot of our actors — and this has become a global thing — are very polished. These guys remain real. And their beauty and their appeal to people is how real they are. They manage to stay in touch with reality. They are not the kind of actors who come in [on a film] and go, “OK, whatever is on the page I’ll do it.” They actually push me and challenge me to make an even better film. And that’s exactly the kind of actors that I want.

Talk to me about Hend Sabri’s role as the zoologist’s wife.

She comes from the same sort of social class as he does, but perhaps she had bigger dreams of moving up the ladder, though not necessarily of becoming the CEO of a big company. In any case, she’s a housewife. She’s a happy mother that is fierce in defense of her children. And she accepts the life that her husband has given her, despite the fact that she would have liked a bit more in life. But she’s not kicking up a fuss about it.

Why is the protagonists’ social class so important in this film?

The film takes place in 2007, at a time when Egypt was kinder. My brief to everybody who boards this project is to say: “This film is meant to remind us of kinder times.” It will take us back to a time when social media basically wasn’t there. Twitter had just started and Facebook was very young. The world was less critical, less harsh and less manipulative. And I’d like to take us back to that time and talk about the middle class — a class that is hardly represented on the screen. We used to represent it in our golden age of cinema, from the the early days and up to the ’70s and ’80s. But then the middle class dwindled, and now we hardly see any movies about it. Almost none.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.