Director Hadi El Bagoury's film Hepta: The Last Lecture has received the Audience Award at the 21st Annual Arabian Sights Film Festival in Washington, DC (21-30 October), where it successfully had two full-house screenings.

Commenting on this, Shirin Ghareeb, the Deputy Director of the festival stated, "The audiences loved the film and were most impressed by it. I couldn't count how many people came up to me to express their overwhelming positive opinions of it."

For seven consecutive weeks, Hepta: The Last Lecture topped the Egyptian box office with revenues that surpassed 27 million EGP, becoming the highest-grossing romantic film in the history of Egyptian cinema. The film has also been released in a number of Arab countries including; the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan and Oman.

This month, Hepta: The Last Lecture will take part in the 38th Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF) within the section dedicated to showcase award-winning films that have been produced between (2015-2016) and have had powerful presence at international film festivals which considered as examples to display the progress that have been scored by the Egyptian cinema to the foreign professionals at the festival.

Recently, the film competed for the Best Feature Film Award at the 6th Malmo Arab Film Festival in Sweden. The film contended for the Anab d'Or in the Feature Film Competition at the 2nd Mediterranean Film Festival of Annaba (FAFM) in Algeria, where it received wide critical and audience acclaim, in addition to its screening at the Arab Camera Festival in Rotterdam.

The film cast list includes: Amr Youssef, Maged El Kedwany, Ahmed Malek, Ahmed Dawood, Dina El Sherbiny, Yasmine Raeis, Jamila Awad, Hany Adel, Ahmed Bedeir, together with Salwa Mohamed Aly, Kinda Alloush, Anoushka, Mohamed Farrag, and Nelly Karim, along with Shereen Reda and the two kids, Abdallah Azmi and Lina Ben Haman. The film is a joint production between Hani Osama's The Producers, Mohamed Hefzy's Film Clinic, and Amgad Sabry's iProductions. The adaptation has been scripted by Wael Hamdy. The film's crew includes Directors of Photography Gamal El Boushy and Leo Carbotta, alongside Production Designer Hend Haidar and Production Manager Mohamed El Hady.

Hepta: The Last Lecture is based on Mohamed Sadek's best-selling book, which portrays the seven stages of love through four paralleled stories. Mohamed Sadek's novel topped the charts in Egypt and throughout the Arab world for several weeks, and sold 36 editions.

The film received a wave of wide acclaim among social media platforms, as several filmmakers, public figures, film stars, and members of the audience expressed their admiration on their Facebook accounts and pages.

Presented by the Washington, DC International Film Festival, the next edition of the Annual Arabian Sights Film Festival will include 12 films from six Arab countries. According to Shirin Ghareeb, Deputy Director of the festival, 50% of the festival's audiences are Americans, which makes the festival a deep-set window that reveals a new realistic image of the Arabs, away from the stereotypes. The festival aims to showcase a growing number of quality films made by talented young Arab filmmakers, exploring issues facing the Arab societies and the current challenges they face.