For three months, adventure filmmaker and author Karin Muller tripped alone across Egypt–living with Cairo’s garbage collectors, drinking tea with camel sellers and fasting through the blistering heat of Islam’s Holy Month.

Muller began her journey in one of Cairo’s notorious slums, where the city’s Coptic Christian garbage collectors taught her how to survive off Cairo’s waste and just how much you can learn about a culture from what it throws away. She also experienced first-hand what happens when a city develops in a completely unregulated free-for-all, with grid-locked traffic and streets too narrow for an ambulance to pass. Then, to better understand Egypt, Karin spent time with members of the Islamic community, fasting with local Muslims throughout the holy month of Ramadan. Muller was invited into one of Cairo’s more conservative mosques, where she discovered an unexpected world of workout gyms and boxing clubs, libraries and theater groups.

Egypt: Beyond The Pyramids explores some of the many faces of this complicated country following the and reveals a fundamentally kind and generous people struggling to emerge from six decades of brutal dictatorship, fear and propaganda.