The Square

 



Jehane Noujaim 

THE SQUARE               B             
Egypt  USA  (95 mi)  2013  d:  Jehane Noujaim            Official site

It’s incredibly important that this very crucial moment of history in Egypt was written by Egyptians.  Egypt has been colonized by every imaginable power over the years, and they’ve always had this concept of the pharaoh that needs to be broken.  We don’t have these stories of the Rosa Parks who sat in the back of the bus, we don’t have these celebrated individuals who have been able to change their country.  So we as filmmakers felt it was very important to follow these very local heroes.

—Jehane Noujaim

From the same filmmaker who directed Control Room (2004), a documentary highlighting media bias, in particular the cooperation between the media and the military in the United States during the March 2003 American invasion of Iraq, a war seen very differently from a military filtered American press than through the lens of the Al Jazeera television network, which includes an Arabic point of view.  While the director is an Egyptian-American woman raised in Kuwait and Cairo before moving to Boston in 1990, eventually graduating from Harvard, here she turns her attention to events leading up to the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, a massive uprising taking place on the streets of Cairo over several weeks in February 2011, including daily gatherings at Tahrir Square captured on smartphones or videorecorders, becoming an on-the-ground document of recent history, culminating with the resignation of sitting President Hosni Mubarak on February 11, 2011.  Seen as part of the Middle East’s reaction to the aftermath of the Iraq War, where a wave of dictators were toppled in the Arab Spring when the region denounced absolute monarchies, human rights violations, and political corruption, advancing an agenda of pro-democratic reforms.  The immediate reaction in Egypt was a nationwide state of euphoria, having lived under a state of emergency for 31 years, where the brutally repressive police tactics routinely included torture of suspected dissidents, especially Islamic fundamentalists, including members of the Muslim Brotherhood.  In many ways, the film is reminiscent of the more harrowing Anders Østergaard film called Burma VJ (2008), documenting another repressive Fascist regime run by military Generals, capturing massive street protests in Burma when any citizen caught with a camera or videorecorder was subject to arrest, beatings, and torture, yet underground video journalists secretly recorded the street scenes anyway, eventually smuggling images out to the rest of the world.         

Euphoria in the streets soon turns to grave concerns, however, as the military continues their ruthless practices, and filling the void of military fascism is the religious fascism advocated by the Muslim Brotherhood, where they are the only organization seen developing a credible political party, renouncing the concerns for social justice, pushing instead for quick democratic elections on a strictly Islamist platform.  We follow these developments through the eyes of several street participants who largely remain friends throughout, notably Ahmed Hassan, a young pro-democracy demonstrator, an advocate of non-violence who fights against police brutality while believing in a free and unified nation, Magdy Ashour, a savagely tortured prisoner who is also an Islamist follower of the Muslim Brotherhood, often conflicted by his own support of non-violence, British-Egyptian actor Khalid Abdella, who starred in THE KITE RUNNER (2007), who now perceives himself more of an instrumental photo-journalist, and Ramy Essam, whose free flowing lyrics provide the musical inspiration to the massive demonstrations, literally inventing the musical soundtrack for the revolutionary sentiment on the streets.  All factions were united at the ousting of Mubarak, but splintered quickly afterwards.  Ahmed is a likable kid, full of brimming idealsm, whose mood shifts constitute the shifting tone of the film, as he and others start to have second thoughts about leaving the solidarity of numbers in “the Square,” as police quickly disburse those that try to return, and there’s a developing animosity between the freedom lovers and the religious Islamists who wish to redefine the terms of change through a religious law and order platform that often negates the rights of others.  When Mohamed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood Party wins the Presidential elections, hitting the ground running faster than all competitors, having an organization already in place, the country becomes even more divided, as they write a highly restrictive, socially conservative constitution that proves extremely unpopular, while also trying to exert control over the military, where to many, Morsi is seen as expanding the autocratic rule to levels worse than under Mubarak.  

Using a cinéma vérité style of chronicling rapidly changing events on the ground, these familiar characters become a stream-of-conscious narrative voice, but events remain confusing, as these jumbled images are often seen without clarifying context, where Khalid happens upon YouTube footage of tanks literally driving over street protesters, leaving many dead bodies in their wake.  While Ahmed and Magdy argue among themselves about who’s to blame, Morsi’s government is portrayed as indifferent to the consequences.  Ahmed’s mood sinks to its lowest when the military starts firing live bullets into gathering crowds of largely peaceful protesters, who fight back only with rocks and cellphone video coverage in a David and Goliath confrontation, where it’s hard to grasp just who’s in charge, as utter chaos describes the pandemonium on the streets, where protesters seen with smartphones or videorecorders are quickly attacked.  One of the more chilling instances is seeing footage from one protester just as the police attack and can be seen electronically tazing him, where the stream of footage comes to an abrupt stop.  While the one constant throughout is the police using excessively lethal force, military support for Morsi galvanizes against him, forcing him to resign as well on July 3, 2013, once again leaving an interim military rule.  With seemingly no one in charge, this transitional aftermath is one of the bloodiest, when a month after the Morsi resignation, the single worst mass killing in recent Egyptian history takes place on August 13, 2013 when military forces kill a thousand Muslim Brotherhood protesters staging a sit-in.  Despite the massive protests for change over the course of several years, this horrific incident seems to have been conducted with a large measure of popular support.  While this film shows the fluctuations at street level through YouTube posts and social media, which gets out to the West, very little of this is explained to the viewer, which can feel confusing as outcomes are never clear, but this does parallel the paucity of political leadership throughout, where a crucial chapter in Egyptian history has also not been shown to the Egyptian people. 

Burma VJ

Dead Japanese journalist Kenji Nagai, camera still in hand

Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi

 

BURMA VJ                 B+             
Norway  Sweden  Denmark  Great Britain  (84 mi)  2008  d:  Anders Østergaard         Official site 

In a repressive regime run by the military Generals, all citizens in Burma are guilty of crimes against the state simply by carrying cameras or videorecorders, which are the exclusive domain of the secret police, who incessantly film any demonstrations in order to identify dissidents and follow up with a flurry of arrests.  With no foreign media allowed in the country and no privately owned media, freedom of expression simply does not exist, as journalists routinely regurgitate government propaganda.  At the bottom of a list of countries along with North Korea and Eritrea, Burma is as completely closed off as a country can get to the outside world.  Underground video journalists known as VJ’s secretly record street scenes, especially any sign of police skirmishes or demonstrators who are usually quickly arrested within minutes, and then smuggle the footage out of the country to safe Internet outlets in both Bangkok and Copenhagen, oftentimes seen later in BBC News broadcasts.  Harassment, psychological pressure, intimidation and round-the-clock surveillance to ordinary citizens are routine, while any violators will be arrested, beaten, imprisoned, subject to torture, and potentially killed. The narration makes reference to Burmese student demonstrations in 1988, the year before the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, when the nation took to the streets to express their desire for democracy instead of a continuing police state, where there was a palpable feel that things would change for the better.  But in one day the police shot 3000 protesters putting an end to that dream, literally firing straight into the crowds hitting anything in sight.  That effectively ended any voice of dissent in Burma, where pro-democracy and subsequent Nobel Peace prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi has been living under house arrest for several decades. 

This film largely consists of video footage shot on the streets along with a neverending chain of phone calls from various members of the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), an underground group of VJ’s who report activities to one another, share Internet feeds, and communicate where someone may need to be in order to capture some footage.  These phone calls are the weak link in the film, as they are a constant voice throughout the film, right alongside the narrator known anonymously as Joshua, and their poor quality, with a mechanized sound to them, really cheapen the product.  While some of these calls may have been helpful, they are overemphasized to the point where they become a distraction, even though they do string together a narrative thread, even posing journalistic questions about whether their work is actually accomplishing anything.  The actual footage itself, the only evidence that any of this actually took place at all (as without it, the government would say it never happened), is not nearly as remarkable as exposing the conditions of what it’s like to live under such dire circumstances that make it a revolutionary act to secretly gather film evidence to be shared with the rest of the world.  Much of this leads to a revival of the spirit of 1988, including street demonstrations, initially sparked by a huge spike in fuel prices in 2007 which led to street protests in Rangoon.  And while there were a few unsuccessful protests that attempted to gain greater strength in numbers, they were quickly dispersed by the police. 

It was only when the Buddhist monks, all clad in the exact same orange cloth, decided to demonstrate in support of the poor in a synchronized march all across the country, where thousands of marchers could be filmed, where bystanders on the street could join in, and this went on for several days.  Initially the police underestimated the size of the marchers and the police units sent out were too small and ineffective to match the strength of the protesters, reaching over 100,000 strong, where the VJ journalists, initially suspected of being secret police because of their visible cameras, were eventually protected by the monks, pulling them inside their ranks.  But like 1988, the police eventually turned on this group as well, using tear gas and the cover of smoke to cover up their actions so that they could not be photographed.  But after shooting and killing a Japanese photo-journalist, they eventually turned on the monks, firing into the crowds and invading their monasteries, arresting some 200 to 500 monks, many of whom were beaten and tortured, some killed and left in the local rivers, and many never heard from again.  The government’s response was to shut down all Internet access, leaving the country in a perpetual state of backward hibernation, where it remains to this day with over 2100 political prisoners languishing in jail for nonspecific crimes.  While the footage itself is raw and sketchy at best, and unfortunately some of the film (without acknowledgment) has been re-enacted, especially the phone call sequences, nonetheless the film does an excellent job portraying the harrowing atmosphere of fear and dread of being forced to live underground, where many of the DVB contacts shown in the film were ultimately arrested or killed, and where any act of defiance in a police state leaves one subject to arrest, torture, and potential death.  Burma remains near the bottom of the list of the Reporters Without Borders world Press Freedom Index.

Postscript

It’s significant that after nearly 21 years of house arrest, becoming one of the world’s most prominent political prisoners, Aung San Suu Kyi was finally released November 13, 2010.  In April 2012, in part due to unprecedented reforms known as the Burmese Spring, opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s party swept nearly all the seats contested in a parliamentary election, while a large majority of seats in Burma’s lower house are controlled by the government party and the military.  Despite a continuing poor human rights record, there have been some noteworthy actions by the government toward reform, releasing several hundred prisoners since 2011.  While some laws have been amended, repressive laws remain.  For the first time in over a decade, however, Burma has jumped favorably upwards on the Press Freedom Index 2013 - Reporters Without Borders, continuing an upward ascent begun last year.  Previously, it had been in the bottom 15 every year since 2002, but now has reached its best-ever position.