Tarek Al Arian touched down at Cannes this week carrying a pitch for a period drama built around Marguerite Alibert — the belle époque courtesan whose résumé included an affair with the Prince of Wales, a marriage to an Egyptian prince, and a murder acquittal at the Old Bailey, all before 1924.
Al Arian, whose Egyptian crime franchise Sons of Rizk made him a bankable name in Arabic-language streaming, is developing the project as his English-language debut, according to a Deadline report dated May 2026. No streamer, studio, or production company is attached at this stage.
The source material is not short on incident. Alibert shot Ali Kamel Fahmy Bey in suite 41 of the Savoy Hotel, London, on the night of July 9–10, 1923. The defense, led by Sir Edward Marshall Hall, secured a full acquittal. What the defense leaned on most heavily — and what the prosecution was largely prevented from rebutting — was correspondence between Alibert and the man who would later abdicate the British throne.
That correspondence was never read aloud in court.