Digital Video magazine — April 2012
‘In Tahrir Square’: HBO Presents an Immersive, Intimate Recounting of Egypt’s Revolution
HBO’s In Tahrir Square: 18 Days of Egypt’s Unfinished Revolution, directed by award-winning documentary filmmakers Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill, follows what began as a peaceful demonstration that quickly grew into the revolutionary movement that would force the resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
On January 25, 2011, mobilized in part by social media, and bolstered by similar protests in other Arab countries, thousands of Egyptians gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to demand the end to Mubarak’s three-decade rule. Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians ultimately participated in the protests at Tahrir Square, with nearly 850 killed. On February 11, 2011, the 18th day, more than a million Egyptians joined the revolution in the square and witnessed the surprise announcement that Mubarak would step down.
Watching In Tahrir Square is to become immersed in the world of the protestors, from the peaceful first days of the uprising through the deadly battles between pro-Mubarak forces and anti-Mubarak demonstrators. The film shadows Sharif Abdel Kouddous, a young Egyptian-American journalist who leads cameras into Tahrir Square and provides insightful accounts of those tense days, his tweets and live reporting attracting international attention.
Alpert, co-executive director of New York’s Downtown Community Television Center (DCTVC), traveled to Cairo with O’Neill and producer Jackie Soohen to document the uprising, bringing a Sony EX3 camera to capture footage along with a Sony Handycam HDR-CX550V for backup.
“When our executive producer, Sheila Nevins, asked ‘Egypt?’ we immediately started packing our bags,” Alpert recounts. “The EX3 ended up serving mainly as a decoy. Because the government was doing whatever it could to restrict media, we anticipated that our cameras would be confiscated at customs. The plan was to allow customs officials to take the big-chip camera while we slipped the small, prosumer camera past them. I had to spend the next five days performing Herculean tasks to get EX3 released from customs, but it was more than worth it.”