Jehane Noujaim
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.
