Mother Jones
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Jehane Noujaim’s The Square, which won an audience award at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and is on the shortlist for an Oscar this year, delivers a fierce and frenetic portrait of life on the Cairo streets during two years of Egypt’s ongoing political unrest. Based on more than 1,600 hours of footage, the film tags along with several revolutionaries—among them Ahmed, a fiery grassroots activist, Magdy, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Khalid, a foreign-born actor—as they struggle against a suffocating regime and attempt to breathe new life into Egypt’s governance.
The Square made headlines when it became Netflix’s first major film acquisition—it will stream exclusively through the service starting January 17—and also because its only scheduled public screening in Egypt was canceled at the last minute. The country’s censorship board still hasn’t give Noujaim, whose past work includes Control Room and Rafea: Solar Mama, permission to screen the film in public.
The doc’s narrative arc initially hinged on the deposition of Hosni Mubarak and subsequent election of Mohamed Morsi as president. But history is often messier than we would wish to tell it. In January 2013, as Noujaim scrambled to meet her Sundance deadlines, she learned that her main characters “were back in the streets again saying, ‘Morsi is using the tools of democracy to create another dictatorship.'” The story wasn’t over.
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