Two movies from Egypt

I've written a little piece on the LRB blog about Jehane Noujaim's documentary The Square -- which still hasn't been screened anywhere in Egypt, unfortunately -- and Ahmad Abdalla's Rags and Tatters, which I've already written about on this blog. 

The first hour of Noujaim’s film is full of familiar faces and jolting violence. The courage of the film-makers, who time and again barely dodged police onslaughts, results in some extraordinary footage. It is hard to watch this reminder of the yearning and suffering that followed Mubarak’s ouster. But it’s important to have this record. I imagined it being played on a continuous loop on all of Egypt’s TV channels, instead of the screeds against ‘terrorism’ and pop music video clips featuring military deployments.