Since the outbreak of the 25 January revolution, activists have worked hard to document the event and its aftermath whether verbally or audiovisually. On the third anniversary, a few weeks ago, Facebook was filled with testimonies in a slew of nostalgia ranging from the ecstatic to the grieving. And so the news that the Egyptian-American documentary filmmaker Jehane Noujaim's The Square became an Academy Award finalist—it also won the Amnesty International award at the Berlinale on Sunday—has prompted heated debate among Egyptians interested in its content and its ultimate political effect. Noujaim's message is after all the exact opposite of the message the Egyptian media in the wake of 30 June. Indeed since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak on 11 February 2011, the media has been consistent in its endorsement of the military establishment as the protector and supporter of the revolution and the Egyptian people's aspirations as embodied in it. Noujaim on the other hand documents the military police's attacks on protesters, which started within a few days of Mubarak's ouster: forced disbanding of protests, virginity tests, arrests and violations culminating in the Maspero, Mohamed Mahmoud and Cabinet massacres. The film argues that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) wanted to cut short the revolution and resume the pre-25 January status quo as fast as possible (equating revolution with protests). Noujaim presented SCAF policies very much as crimes against humanity. Like much mainstream discourse that sees any criticism of the military or the police as part of a conspiracy to bring back the Muslim Brotherhood and support Islamist “terrorism” (whose president, Mohamed Morsi, was ousted by the military on 3 July 2013), many have attacked the film and Noujaim. Yet the film, shot over the last three years, is in fact a precise record of the revolution from its outbreak to Morsi's ouster, concluding with the attempt by Morsi partisans to storm the Republican Guard on 8 July 2013, which resulted in the death of 50 protesters. The film ends powerfully with Rami Essam, the “revolution's singer”, strumming one of the chants of the Ultras football supporters who were so instrumental to the later stages of protests on his guitar, back in Tahrir Square. Documentary filmmakers have seldom gone into such depth with attempts at turning the revolution into cinema. Through three main characters, Noujaim manages to afford enormous detail: Ahmad is an always smiling, poor university graduate from the lower middle class who has been unable to find work. He recounts how he has always had to work to get through school, saying it was YouTube videos of the police torturing citizens that drove him to go out on 25 January — yet in a rare slip, one of the videos here belongs to a much later time and involves the military police torturing a suspect. The film follows the development in Ahmad's character from a disillusioned young man to a political activist who, by the time of the Mohamed Mahmoud clashes, can hold his own in the most complicated political discussions with fellow activists at Tahrir Square. The Egyptian-British actor Khalid Abdalla—as a committed participant in the revolution and a source of information for the Western media—is the son of the Student Movement activist and doctor Hossam Abdalla, something Khalid is always aware of. This is among the most important aspects of the film's structure, reflecting the intellectual and historical background to what is happening on the streets, with the actor's appearances on international screens no less than his private discussions with his father over the phone or with the former Weekly editor Mona Anis—another Student Movement activist—reflecting the theoretical dimension of the revolution. Magdi is a 40-something member of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), coming from a slightly better off background than Ahmad's. This is possibly the most dramatic character in the film, since he is so consistently opposed to the official MB policy. Committed to the revolution, at almost every stage he felt the MB leaders were betraying it. Often he went against instructions not to demonstrate, and when his fellow Brothers attacked his fellow revolutionaries who were protesting against Morsi in December 2012 he almost left the MB altogether—something he was still considering when the MB fell with millions-strong demonstrations on 30 June 2013. Ahmad is ecstatic when Morsi is ousted, but in a moving scene Magdi calls him from the Rabaa Al-Adaweyah sit-in, where MB members are protesting the ouster, talking about his fear of the sit-in being disbanded by force and saying he would prefer death to arrest. In the end the film is not an unbiased document of the revolution but a defence of it against the kind of ideological divisions that stood in its way, and it places a huge amount of first-hand material before political scientists and historians, making a comprehensive record of the period from January 2011 to July 2013.
