Dropping you right smack-dab in the middle of a revolution, Stefano Savona’s inspiring documentary on Egypt’s 2011 uprising against President Hosni Mubarak gives viewers a ground-level view of what happened once that titular downtown Cairo square turned into ground zero for Middle Eastern democracy: the passionate pleas for the politician to step down, the fear of being shot at by snipers, the joyous group chanting, the endless arguments about how to proceed, and the agony and ecstasy of everyday people finally saying enough is enough. What the Sicilian filmmaker’s narration-free, fly-on-the-wall approach may lack in terms of macro-contextualizing this Arab Spring game changer, it more than makes up for with frontline accounts and first-person testimonies. The result may occasionally be more of a journalistic scrapbook than a Wisemanian all-points portrait, but the impact of seeing such unvarnished public activism in the raw can’t be overestimated.
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