Four-nation In the Last Days of the City/Akher Ayam el Madina -- more literal translation might substitute “Great” or “Best” for “Last” -- was shot over eight years. The two minutes short of two hours recalls Jehane Noujaim’s ongoing 2013 non-fiction The Square but links Bassem Fayad’s atmospheric fact- and vehicle-jammed street scenes photography through a scripted story of actors and crew in some cases playing themselves as characters. This début from also co-scriptwriter/-producer Tamer El Said celebrates life and death and love and loss, friendship and filmmaking itself, rage and revolution, especially all these in the chaos of a beleaguered but beloved world city.

Ancient eight-to-nineteen-million-population Cairo here is hardly that same “city of nowhere” of Ossama Fawzi’s 1999 black humor-horror madhouse Fallen Angels Paradise; rather, it is a many-sided human construct, a living being like a family member at once adored and abominated. The long violence that ended Hosni Mubarak’s three decades as president but has continued after his ouster as well, the military-police-civilian and religious-secular clashes, the traditional vs. the modern, the physical structures abandoned or sledge-hammered to dust by workers for urbanization and speculation, are part and parcel of the whole.

The metropolis draws the human spirit back to, into, itself. Thus while three of four central people may have returned or moved abroad, indeed even acquired permanent resident alien status in Berlin or Baghdad or Beirut -- three B’s also beleaguered, each in its own way -- they return to Egypt’s capital to participate in a panel discussion and to reconnect.

Reuniting, reminiscing, rekindling memories and relationships, talking shop, they are still and always tied to Cairo. When Hassan, Tarek and Bassem (Hayder Helo, Basim Hajar and the DP Fayad) leave again, they promise remaining Khalid (Khalid Abdalla, also a co-producer here and a major player in The Square) to send back samples of their own film work, and their advice further urges him along in his Cairo film that has lost direction or perhaps never had any in the first place.

Like his stuffy unaired apartment walled with photos and portraits framed and stagnant in the past, Khalid cannot come to grips with the present, cannot live in it or get his project to gel. By much the most taciturn of the four filmmaker friends, he is yet their center, perhaps because the only one permanently on home soil and therefore also the center of this North American première selection in the Film Society of Lincoln Center/Museum of Modern Art forty-fifth New Directors/New Films.

Self-effacing in perpetual white button-down shirt, red V-neck sweater and beard stubble, he blends into the woodwork walking, as if on another plane, by and among angry chanting demonstrators and lines of scared baby-faced riot police. He is looking to change apartments, but his lack of decisiveness has exasperated the less than confidence-inspiring real estate agent showing him various flats. He loves and visits his widowed, apparently dying mother (Zeinab Miostafa) in Al Salaam Hospital but has nothing to say to her. At thirty-three two years younger than he, Laila (Laila Samy) figures in his past; no reason is given, but she may well have ended it because of his non-defined self. Her surprise last-minute phone call and visit before leaving, too, do not change things.

No pharaohs, mummies, monuments or storied rivers are brought in, but just being itself real hero Cairo is ancient, has gazed like a sphinx on armies, invasions, conquests, turmoil and outrage. It is not to be pinned like a desiccated butterfly by any filmmaker or chronicler. Khalid may or may not get his film-within-this-film together. The millennia will in any case continue long after these and all individual characters have crumbled to dust in this at times confusing swirl, and the living city will remain even should “lone and level sands stretch far away.”

(Released by W O L F; not rated by MPAA.)