Thugs and Sticks

They came out in droves, old and young, and they took the streets. And what one person told me was, when they would be beat down and tear-gassed, others would come in and rush the police, and then they would fall down, and others would come back after them. And they said, “We gave each other courage.”
—Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Democracy Now!, 31 January 2011

“I won’t leave until Mubarak leaves,” announces a man holding a large Egyptian flag. “They may attack. A big attack with thugs and sticks. Let them attack.” On the ninth day of protests in Tahrir Square last January, Mohamed sounds assured. This even though he’s surrounded by marchers in support of President Hosni Mubarak. As Mohamed and his fellow protestors chant, “Mubarak must leave!”, their opponents shout just as fervently, “He won’t leave!”

The division looked impassable when Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill were recording the many images now assembled for the documentary, In Tahrir Square: 18 Days of Egypt’s Unfinished Revolution. Premiering on HBO2 exactly one year after the revolution commenced, the film is mostly observational and often fragmented, emulating the chaos of those 18 days while also granting you a way through it. It shows people facing danger and feeling hopeful, refusing to step back even when Mubarak sends in those “thugs and sticks,” or, strangely and spectacularly, a squad of toughs on camels and horses.

As Mohamed sees it, it’s about time. A journalist and member of the Muslim Brotherhood, he’s been protesting the government for years. After he’s arrested that day in the Square—and released after seven hours—he shows his nephew, Democracy Now! reporter Sharif Abdel Kouddous, what he calls his “tools of the trade,” that huge flag and a bullhorn, and reveals this is the eleventh time he’s been arrested. “People laughed at me,” Mohamed says. Now, he smiles, “I turned out to be right.”

Mohamed and Sharif provide the film with two related perspectives on the protests, mutually supportive even as they come with different experiences. The veteran activist looks on what’s happening in Tahrir Square as a kind of vindication, the result of years of abuse and corruption by the Mubarak administration. The film opens with a very brief illustration of this history, a montage of rough footage showing “Egyptian police interrogations” and the early street demonstrations that led to the revolution. The first shot shows a woman tied upside down to a chair, pleading with the camera operator, her screams providing a soundtrack to the couple of minutes following, which include men beaten, bloodied, and, in one instance, held down as a police officer comes at his bruised bottom, prod at the ready.

While these images—at once brutal, immediate, and unnervingly abstract—underline how protestors have come to their sense of desperation and resolve, the Egyptian-American Sharif and his uncle offer other sorts of background. Walking the filmmakers through the streets to the Square, he cautions they’d best hide the camera for the upcoming checkpoint, “because we don’t want another problem like we had at the other checkpoint.” You don’t know exactly what that problem was, as the film more or less injects you into the current moment, but you know enough. And so, when the scene cuts to a post-checkpoint moment, Sharif surveying a crowd, you can appreciate his surprise at the numbers gathered in public for an event that’s not a soccer game.

In Tahrir Square remembers and pays tribute to the social media that helped to shape that gathering, with a couple of video clips, uploaded to the internet (“I’m not going to hide my name,” says one young man). Sharif’s own reports at the time included tweets, emails, phone calls, and cellphone footage. Here, filmed by Alpert and O’Neill (who arrived on the scene with cameras just days after the protests began), he speaks to people in the Square—a young man in mirror sunglasses (“The government gave people $75 to say yes to Mubarak, they will make war between us”), a middle-aged man sitting at a backgammon board (“There’s been so much corruption”), and several elderly protestors (Mubarak, says one woman, “stacked up the money, the people have nothing to eat”).

These testimonies serve as explanation for the dedication of the people in the Square. Even as police, plain clothes and uniformed, armed with sticks and guns, charge them, the civilians stand their ground. The film offers bits of harrowing history—people throwing stones, washing tear gas from their eyes, running from tanks, pulling others to safety, avoiding fires, building basic barricades with materials at hand—reminding you of what you watched on TV or YouTube a year ago and also structuring the chaos just enough that the revolution take on a trajectory, citizens rallying and responding, authorities using whatever force they have to quell what looks more and more like and unstoppable movement.

The film does stop. But it doesn’t provide a particular end. As these protests in Tahrir Square lead to others elsewhere (a million people take to the streets by the 18th day) and these lead to Mubarak’s resignation, Sharif and Mohamed hug one another. They’re weary and wary, even as they’re happy to see, at last, a reaction to these 18 days, as well as to years of other forms of resistance. They can’t know what will happen next, how the military will rule (or agree to stop ruling), how so many decades of injustice will be redressed. But as they walk away from the camera, they are, for the moment, free to go home, to assemble, to speak out.