Back to the Square (2012)

Directed by: Petr Lom | 83 minutes | documentary

In January and February 2011, Tahrir Square in the Egyptian capital Cairo was world news every day. Thousands, mostly young people, protested against the abuses in the country and demanded the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. On February 11, 2011, the vice president of the North African country announced that Mubarak had resigned. The hopes for better living conditions that many Egyptians cherished soon proved vain. The court martial took power in the country from Mubarak and the oppression of the people continued as usual. Thousands of people involved in the protests were wrongly arrested, mistreated or mistreated. Filmmaker Petr Lom, who previously made documentaries about human rights violations in countries such as China and Iran, paid a visit to Tahrir Square six months after the so-called Arab Spring to gauge the current state of affairs in Egypt. He sought out five people who had personally experienced the dark side of the revolution. He incorporated their experiences into the documentary ‘Back to the Square’ (2012), which became one of the public’s favorites at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam 2012.

For his film, Lom visited Wally, a fifteen-year-old boy who can neither read nor write and has to live with his penniless family on less than two dollars a day. Money that he and his brother earn by selling souvenirs to tourists near the pyramids. At the request of local supporters of Mubarak, he took his bone-thin horse to Tahrir Square. It is not known exactly what he was promised, but it is clear that his act was naive. The poor boy was mistaken by the protesting crowd as a supporter of Mubarak and brutally beaten. His father had to sell the family’s only goat, which was saved for the Feast of the Sacrifice, in order to pay for his son’s medical expenses. The stories of Mohamed and Maikel are of a completely different order. Taxi driver Mohamed spent six years in prison but was released during the revolution to fight the insurgents. When he refuses to fight against his own people, he is brutally beaten by supporters of Mubarak’s regime. He will have to carry the scars that the corrosive hydrochloric acid has made all over his body for the rest of his life. Maikel Nabil is a well-known blogger, who was jailed for three years for allegedly spreading false information in his texts and insulting the armed forces. While his younger brother protests against Maikel’s imprisonment on Tahrir Square, the blogger himself goes on a hunger strike.

Two women also speak. Lamiz seeks support from various human rights movements to get her husband released. The two were arrested and tortured during their move. Lamiz was also assaulted by the military who arrested her. Salwa also has bad memories of soldiers. The reputation of the young rural woman, who has not spoken up, has been damaged after she was intimidated and mistreated by a group of gunmen. She was also forced to undergo a virginity test. In the conservative village where she lives, people speak of it as a disgrace. Shocking is the scene in which Salwa and her mother receive Lom and his assistant into their house. The village elder enters the house to see who these strange western men are who, without his knowledge, meddle with this household consisting solely of women and children. No wonder that not long after Salwa flees the village and goes to live in Cairo. But the question is whether she will really be happy there.

‘Back to the Square’ starts off lightly with the search for the man who would have called his daughter ‘Facebook’ because of the revolution. Lom soon abandons that light-hearted tone and paints a fairly bleak picture of Egypt after Mubarak left. It gives you quite a feeling of powerlessness when you realize that despite the removal of the former dictator, little or nothing has changed in the country. Human rights are widely violated. Despite the sketchy sketch of the situation, ‘Back to the Square’ is also a tribute to the many courageous people who use the revolution to open their mouths, even though they know it could cost them dearly. Lom could have made his film even more appealing by providing some background information here and there. That would have brought some more structure and clarity to the whole. Nevertheless, ‘Back to the Square’, just like Lom’s previous documentary ‘Letters to the President’ (2009) – about the populist propaganda politics of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – is an urgent and penetrating film that once again underlines that the revolution in the Arab world is far from over.