Stefano Savano puts viewers right in the middle of the recent Egyptian rebellion in TAHRIR
TAHRIR: LIBERATION SQUARE (Stefano Savona, 2011)
Maysles Institute
343 Malcolm X Blvd. between 127th & 128th Sts.
June 11-17, suggested donation $10, 7:30
212-582-6050
www.mayslesinstitute.org
As soon as Stefano Savano heard about the people’s rebellion going on in Egypt’s Tahrir Square in January, the Italian filmmaker grabbed his camera and headed over to Cairo, where he had been many times before over the previous twenty years, and just started filming what he saw. As hundreds of thousands of Egyptians flooded the area, singing, protesting, and demanding that President Hosni Mubarak step down, Savano followed around various individuals and groups, including Elsayed, Noha, and Ahmed, getting them to share their thoughts on revolution and change, capturing intimate moments of their fight for freedom. When violence erupts, Savano fearlessly heads to the source, rocks flying through the air, bleeding men being carried past him. The film has no narration and no textual information; instead, Savano places the viewer right in the middle of the action, as if we’re there with him in Tahrir Square. “I’m not a journalist, and I don’t pretend to be one,” Savano pointed out in a Skype press conference following a New York Film Festival preview screening of the film last year. Over the course of two weeks last summer, Savano and Penelope Botroluzzi edited down thirty-five hours of visuals and twenty-five hours of sound into this ninety-minute inside look at democracy in action, although it does get repetitive in the second half. Once again Savona, whose previous films include 2002’s A Border of Mirrors, 2006’s Notes from a Kurdish Rebel, and last year’s Spezzacatene, focuses more on the human element than the political, adding a coda during the credits that places much of what went on before into intriguing perspective. Tahrir: Liberation Square will be screening June 11-17 as part of the Maysles Institute’s Documentary in Bloom series curated by Livia Bloom.