A found-footage collage emerges from five archives in post–Arab Spring Egypt: an activist in exile, the recruitment of a group of cadets from a military academy, a television series, and other fragments of a generation born of a failed revolution. The film reclaims propaganda — so deeply performative — in which the athletic male body is staged as the ultimate agent of the authoritarian state led by President el-Sisi.
Activist Wael Ghonim, a computer scientist and former Google executive, was a central figure in the Arab Spring in Egypt in 2011. In this film, he also appears as the central figure, years later, in exile, caught between lucidity and the mental collapse of someone who witnessed all the dreams of a revolution crumble into a new autocracy. What we see is a fascinating and overwhelming archival work that exposes the aestheticization of violence, the cult of the body — even in children — as a war machine, repression turned into entertainment, and historical revisionism, all promoted by President el-Sisi’s regime. A denunciation and warning about the propaganda machine serving an autocrat, in Egypt as in all other autocracies around the world, or those on that path. (Carlos Ramos)
