After watching Jehane Noujaim’s documentary, The Square, Eric Trager blames the original Tahrir Square revolutionaries for the failure of Egypt’s revolution:
The protesters’ relationship with the military stands out in this regard. While the small group of protesters on whom The Square focuses warily accepts the military takeover following Mubarak’s fall in February 2011, the bulk of the film highlights the profound violence of the junta’s 16-month rule. During this period, over 12,000 Egyptian civilians were tried before military courts, and security forces’ deadly crackdowns on protesters are now memorialized by their geographic locations around Tahrir Square—Maspero, Mohamed Mahmoud, Magles al-Wuzara—as if they were major battles in a drawn-out war. The film’s protagonists are occasionally among these battles’ casualties: They are chased and beaten by thugs, and repeatedly choke on expired teargas. At one point, Ahmed takes some birdshot to the head. The violence subsides temporarily after Mohamed Morsi’s victory in the June 2012 presidential elections, as the junta’s reign ends shortly thereafter. But one year later—and only 15 minutes after Morsi’s victory in the 100-minute film’s run-time—the activists are suddenly willing to accept the military’s return to power.
In an interview with Larry Rohter, Noujaim explains how she decided on a place to end the film, even as the events in Egypt continued to unfold:
That’s always the most difficult part of making these films, but especially so with this one, because the revolution was ongoing, things were changing constantly. The first time that the film allowed us to end it was when Morsi was elected. That was a political continuum, from the bringing down of a dictator to the election of a president. And we had finished that film and were on our way to Sundance in January 2013, and two weeks before we went there, all of our characters were back in the streets again saying, “Morsi is using the tools of democracy to create another dictatorship.” We realized there was a much more interesting story to tell, and it required us to continue filming, because the story became about holding government accountable, no matter who that government is.
So did you feel a twinge when Morsi was overthrown last summer, a desire to keep going?
We felt we were like on another chapter, of the military coming back into control again. But this was the beginning of another cycle, and another film. In the end it’s a character-driven film rather than a news-driven film, and our characters had come to the point where their arc had come to a conclusion, even though events continued on the ground.
The Dish 