"The Square" of the title is Tehrir Square in Cairo, scene of all the major Egyptian protest demonstrations of the past two years. and this is a two hour long documentary on the Nightmarish 'Arab Spring' in Egypt, is an astounding personal summary of the events in Egypt from the fall of the Mubarak dictatorship in early 1991 to the rise and fall of the Moslem Brotherhood under "legally elected" Islamist president Morsi just a few months ago.
The intrepid female director, Jehane Noujaim, an American Egyptian filmmaker went to Cairo in January 2001 to witness the historical events taking place in her family's home town, but with no such ambitious film project yet in mind ....
At the end, you may also understand it better than you did before. This fearless exercise in political reportage is also a formidable, if necessarily raw, work of political thought. Ms. Noujaim's sympathies are clearly with those who refer to themselves as "revolutionaries" - a word that comes to signify resistance to both the Brotherhood and the military - but she is hardly blind to their limitations. The revolutionaries are able to compel the world's attention and sympathy, and to risk life and limb in defiance of authority, but they have neither the organizational discipline nor the strategic ability to assume and exercise power. Lacking weapons or a party apparatus, they become pawns and bystanders in an increasingly lethal struggle between forces more ruthless and less principled than they. This is a tragedy, not only for Ahmed and his friends, but also, it's fair to say, for the Egyptian people as a whole. But "The Square," while it records the gruesome collision of utopian aspirations with cold political realities, is not a despairing film. It concludes on a note of resolve grounded in the acknowledgment that historical change can be a long, slow process. It suggests that the Egyptian revolution, after a glorious birth and a blighted infancy, is still at Square 1.
At the end, you may also understand it better than you did before. This fearless exercise in political reportage is also a formidable, if necessarily raw, work of political thought. Ms. Noujaim's sympathies are clearly with those who refer to themselves as "revolutionaries" - a word that comes to signify resistance to both the Brotherhood and the military - but she is hardly blind to their limitations. The revolutionaries are able to compel the world's attention and sympathy, and to risk life and limb in defiance of authority, but they have neither the organizational discipline nor the strategic ability to assume and exercise power. Lacking weapons or a party apparatus, they become pawns and bystanders in an increasingly lethal struggle between forces more ruthless and less principled than they. This is a tragedy, not only for Ahmed and his friends, but also, it's fair to say, for the Egyptian people as a whole. But "The Square," while it records the gruesome collision of utopian aspirations with cold political realities, is not a despairing film. It concludes on a note of resolve grounded in the acknowledgment that historical change can be a long, slow process. It suggests that the Egyptian revolution, after a glorious birth and a blighted infancy, is still at Square 1.