The film was nominated for Best Documentary at this year's Academy Awards and the title refers to Cairo’s Tahrir Square, where the Arab Spring of 2011 spontaneously coalesced and then erupted, resulting in President Hosni Mubarak’s removal from power after 30 years of rule. But because the story has continued to evolve, dramatically so in recent months, Noujaim’s film is longer (by eight minutes) than when it debuted, and the film’s tenor has changed, too. It now also shows what betrayal feels like, on all sides.
The early scenes of “The Square,” of course, are a group portrait of joyous disbelief. The director follows a balanced handful of young Egyptians — faces in the crowd of the Square — from the midpoint of the 2011 uprising, just as it’s gathering critical mass. The movie’s undisputed star is Ahmed Hassan, who is baby faced young when the uprising begins and who, two years later, is fully wise to the ways of the world. That Ahmed holds on to his ideals and irrepressible sense of commitment in the face of all the Egyptian military and the Brotherhood can throw at his country is the movie’s most convincing claim to hope for the future.
When the military forces elections early after Mubarak’s ouster and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi is reluctantly voted in by many protesters, the young man hazards a guess that the new president is sowing the seeds for his own downfall. “The more they control, the more the people will hate them,” he says of the Brotherhood. After the actual coup — when Morsi was removed from office by the military in July 2013 and a series of violent reprisals against his followers ensued — we see the firebrands of Tahrir Square struggle to keep their goal of a free, democratic Egypt in sight.
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