Looking at Egypt's Revolution Through 'The Square'
Mohamed Morsi, the first democratically elected president in Egypt’s history, made his first public appearance in four months today in a Cairo courtroom. The Muslim Brotherhood leader, who was deposed in a military-backed coup on July 3, sat in a cage along with 14 co-defendants at their trial’s chaotic opening.
Two years ago, Egypt’s overthrown dictator, Hosni Mubarak, was seated in the same cage, facing his own trial for the premeditated murder of protestors. The long-serving autocrat was driven from power by the same revolution that eventually brought Morsi to the presidency—a protracted dance of protest and occupation that saw loyalties flipping, unholy alliances being made and broken.
And ultimately, for most of the young pro-democracy protestors who were followed in the new documentary The Square, the revolution shattered the lofty ideals that came to North Africa with the Arab Spring.
“Tahrir is a land: If you’ve got control of it, you have power. It pulls people to you,” a young woman wearing glasses says in unaccented English, referring to the square of the documentary’s title. She and a diverse group of young revolutionaries are sitting in an apartment that's the informal headquarters of the young, non-secular, liberal faction of the protest movement. Cinematically, the apartment looks out over Tahrir, the bird’s eye view befitting the lofty debates about the revolution that take place there.
But below, on the Square, the group filmmaker Jehane Noujaim follows—which include Khalid Abdalla, the Egyptian actor who starred in the film version of The Kite Runner, the charismatic Ahmed, and Magdy, the grey-bearded elder statesmen of the group who was repeatedly tortured for being a member of the Brotherhood, among others—are anything but disengaged.
This technologically adept wing of the Arab Spring leveraged Twitter and YouTube to organize and inform, and had a heartthrob singer, a Drake look-alike, to give the revolution sex appeal.
But controlling Tahrir was not ultimately possible for the film’s subjects, and as The Square shows through their eyes and efforts, the people were pulled another direction, toward the Brotherhood, the Salafis, the Islamists.
The Revolution quickly turned from something democratic, a mission for “bread, freedom, social justice, dignity,” as one rally cry went, to a politicized, radicalized affair. Ahmed, handsome and beautifully, frustratingly idealistic, says of Tahrir early in the film that the square is, “a place of pride and dignity—where a tent and a blanket can solve all of your problems.”
When fundamentalists moved to take over the protest, “the Quran is our constitution” became the new rallying cry.
Today, Morsi's trial was adjourned until the beginning of next year, but only after the deposed president contributed to the surreal proceeding by refusing to wear a white prison jumpsuit. He and the other defendants drowned out official proceedings with chants shouted from their barred confinement. And like Morsi appearing in Mubarak’s cage, like the shifting nature of the protest, waxing and waning from utopian to fundamentalist, The Square is in many ways a story of truths becoming un-truths.
“The army will sacrifice their last drop of blood before they fire a single bullet on the people,” says one military figure when speaking with protestors early in the film. “The army and the people are one hand,” the masses at Tahrir shouted when the military lined up with the revolution to push out Mubarak.
Then the cameras show the army moving in to clear the square, soldiers yelling “If you don’t go home, you will be shot.”
As live bullets were fired on protestors, one revolutionary screams, “So this is the army! This is what the army is like!”
Abdalla, the actor, works to put cameras in the hands of as many protestors as possible, asking them to document everything that happens. “We should film as much as we can... The truth is, things are moving quickly. And we don’t know when this material can be used as evidence,” he said, and, indeed, evidence of horrendous acts was captured.
High above Tahrir, in the liberal faction's apartment, Abdalla and the others painstakingly cut the raw footage into short videos to be spread via Facebook and YouTube.
The same cameras capture protesters being run over by military vehicles in an effort to break up a protest in front of the State Television building in the fall of 2011. Screening the difficult footage of the bodies bending impossibly under the heavy-tread tires, killing their friend Mina, a Coptic Christian, and others, Abdalla remarks that “No one call tell our stories except for us.”
That incident occurs in the winter of 2011, with the elections, set for the following spring fast approaching; the sense that “our stories,” as Abdalla references, could coalesce into a national narrative of non-secular democracy, as was the bright hope in the beginning of the flim, is lost.
The Square ends where the today’s courtroom incident begins, with the army again lining up behind the revolution to push out a President. Except unlike Mubarak, Morsi was democratically elected. Still, for Ahmed and his friends, save Magdy, Morsi must go too.
In one of the most frustrating and honest scenes in the documentary, Ahmed and Magdy are shown speaking to each other on the phone just before coup. Magdy is headed for Tahrir, and it's clear that the stakes are far higher now then in the revolution’s early, idealistic days. He's going to the square in spite of whatever fate might await him.
“Honestly, I want to come stand with you. After all, this revolution was for a principal, not for blood.” Ahmed said to Magdy.
And yet Ahmed is supporting the overthrow of a president that could bring about another era in which Magdy would face repeated detentions and torture—if not death.
“But we still respect each other’s opinions,” Magdy says to Ahmed.
They agreed that they both wanted the best for their country.
Related stories on TakePart:
• 2011: The Year of Arab Spring
• Tahrir Square and UC Davis: Dueling Videos
• Tahrir Square and UC Davis: Dueling Videos
• Is Egypt One Year Closer to Freedom?
• In Photos: Egypt's Unprecedented Protests
Original article from TakePart
