'Omar' nominated for best foreign-language film at the 2014 Academy Awards. Credit: Dubai International Film Festival

By Anicée Gohar
UNITED NATIONS, May 16 2014 (IPS)

‘Omar’, a thriller and love story by director Hany Abu-Assad, is the first movie of its kind to be funded almost entirely by Palestinians, using a majority-Palestinian crew.

It tells the story of what is for many Palestinians “ordinary life”. The protagonist, Omar, a young Palestinian baker, is forced to have routine interactions with Israeli soldiers at checkpoints that separate him from his Palestinian lover, and the homes of his friends.

The film exposes the many consequences a Palestinian faces for lashing out against the Israeli occupation, as well as the resource-imbalance between Palestinian “freedom fighters’” – who scrounge stolen cars and rig up amateur explosives – and the Israeli military’s high-tech helicopters and precision weapons.

Academy Award-nominee for best foreign-language movie, ‘Omar’ was recently screened at the United Nations Headquarters to honour the designation of 2014 as the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People (IYSPP).

Proclaimed by the General Assembly in November 2013, the IYSPP is based on the belief that a peace process between Israel and Palestine is impossible without improved international awareness on the core issues that comprise the ‘Palestinian question’: the problem of settlements, the blockage of Gaza, and the application of international laws.

The film’s co-star and producer Waleed Zuaiter told IPS the challenges they faced during production were not political but typical of the obstacles that hinder independent moviemaking in a country with limited resources.

Still, whenever a motion picture is inspired by Palestinian experiences, political hiccups are usually close at hand.

Shot in Palestine, the separation wall forms an important part of the story, depicting not only the isolation of Palestinians from Israeli society but also the separation of Palestinian communities from one another.

“A lot of the world does not know about the wall,” Zuaiter said, referring to the part-concrete part-barbed-wire barrier that was erected during negotiations of the Oslo Accords in 1996 to limit Palestinians’ movements.

Still, the film purposely chose not to explain the history behind the wall in order to spark intrigue and raise questions by showing rather than telling the reality of a highly controversial structure.

The film comes at a critical juncture, coinciding with determined attempts by the Palestinian government to gain legitimacy as an official U.N. member state, as opposed to their current status as a Permanent Observer.

‘Omar’ brings the list of Palestinian movies screened this year at U.N. headquarters up to three.

Despite this cultural penetration, progress on a viable peace process within the Security Council, largely seen as the U.N.’s steering committee, has been less promising.

Palestinian director Abu-Assad is known for believing in the role art can play to shake up the status quo, while Executive Director Abbas F. Zuaiter’s main motive was to allow talented artists and members of the younger generation to express themselves through story telling.

Especially since the Arab Spring, young people have felt the urge to utilise technology to spread awareness about their realities, the director told IPS, and that train of thought must be encouraged.

As an investor, he said in an interview with IPS, he wanted filmmakers from the region to “have their stories…read, critiqued, underwritten and distributed”, and investors to realise it is a profitable industry.

Migrants ride the train dubbed 'La Bestia' towards the United States. Credit: Kino Lorber, Inc

By Anicée Gohar
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 24 2014 (IPS)

Security enhancements on the U.S.-Mexico border reroute migrants into more perilous and dry areas, causing between 150 and 250 migrants to die in the desert every year.

A new documentary titled ‘Who is Dayani Cristal’ reminds us that more dangerous conditions do not deter migrants from embarking on the frightening journey from Latin America to the United States.

In the film, a Honduran elder describes the journey, safer a few generations ago, as a “decision about death”. Still, the undocumented immigrant population in the U.S. – the bulk of which is comprised of residents from Latin America – grew by 27 percent between 2000 and 2009, reaching 11.5 million in 2011.

The film, winner of the Sundance 2013 Cinematography award, tells of the dark work undertaken by workers at the Pima County Morgue in Arizona – trying to match missing persons with the bodies found around the border.

The story zeroes in on the peculiar case of a decomposing body found in the sun-blistered Arizona desert, 20 minutes away from the U.S. border and only identifiable by a tattoo on the chest that read, ‘Dayani Cristal’.

Like him, thousands of migrants have been reported missing in the last decade in that part of the Arizona desert that migrants call “the corridor of death”. The Pima County morgue has counted more than 2,000 bodies in the last decade, of which around 700 remain unidentified.

As the ‘Dayani Cristal’ investigation unfolds, actor and director Gael Garcia Bernal takes us from Central America to the United States, retracing what is for many migrants their final journey.

Martin Silver, who produced the film with Bernal, said in an interview with IPS that the ‘Dayani Cristal’ story captures the problem in microcosm, with a single unidentified skull in the desert acting as a mirror for the world’s inequalities.

Often treated as criminals by society as well as law enforcement personnel, migrants are humanised in the documentary, which also answers questions such as: what can bring someone on such a life-threatening journey?

Silver explains it is often a collision of many different factors, such as poverty and global trade rules that prohibit farmers in countries like Honduras from profiting off small-scale agriculture.

Migrants’ remittances, which enable their families to live in comfort that would otherwise have been impossible, add to the list of incentives.

Youth from the rural areas of major sending countries like Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala feel especially compelled to move north the moment they realise that their most cherished possessions like cars, stereos and televisions are procured using remittances from relatives in the U.S, Silver told IPS.

The documentary’s director hopes the U.S. premier of the film will spark a more humane debate on what Bernal describes as “one of the main factors that has shaped the history of human kind and the planet: migration”.

As a morgue worker in the film pointed out: the sweat of this troubled workforce fuels the U.S. economy; it is time the American public woke up to the nightmare that undocumented immigrants live in.

A “Take Action” section on the documentary’s website allows those who want to engage in advocacy projects to do so by offering help at every stage of the migrants’ journey, starting from Honduran schools.

A blood-spattered camera in a Baghdad hotel. (AFP/Patrick Baz)

By Anicée Gohar
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 16 2014 (IPS)

On Thursday, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) launched the 2014 Impunity Index, classifying countries with the highest number of journalist murders that remain unsolved.

Calculated as a percentage of each country’s population, the Impunity Index shows the extent to which authorities lack the will to pursue justice for slain journalists.

The 2014 index examines cases of murdered journalists for the years 2004 through 2013 in which perpetrators went free from liability. Only countries with five or more cases are included on the index. This year’s list counted 13 countries, one more than last year.

For as long as the index has existed – six years – Iraq has been at the top of the list of nations where journalists’ murders go unpunished, with 100 percent impunity.

Despite two years of respite, a resurgence of militant groups caused the deaths of 10 journalists last year in Iraq, of which nine were targeted murders.

There has been only one case of a confirmed murder of a journalist in the 11 years following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, said Sherif Mansour, a Middle East and North Africa expert at CPJ, despite the fact that 13 journalists were killed as a result of their profession in 2003 alone.

The agency also made note of allegations that U.S. forces were behind deliberate media targeting, though these have not been proven, Mansour said.

This is not to say that before the war, Iraq was a country with a free press, Mansour told IPS; rather, “killing was not needed” because the political situation simply allowed no space for journalists to challenge the government in any way.

The index is yet another indicator that the rise of militant groups pose a particular threat to press freedom. CPJ reported that more than 40 percent of global suspected perpetrators of journalist murders are political groups, including armed factions, while 26 percent of those responsible are government and military officials.

This year, for the first time, Syria appeared among the top five countries with the worst record of impunity after Iraq, Somalia, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka, and right before Afghanistan. Syria had already been ranked as the most dangerous country for the media by a previous CPJ report.

According to the agency’s findings, the majority of those murdered covered politics, corruption, and war in their home countries.

The issue of impunity has received growing attention from the international community, in particular from the U.N. General Assembly, which adopted a resolution last November on ‘Safety of Journalists’, calling on states to end impunity.

The Star of David in the Jewish district near Alazhar, Cairo. Credit: Jews of Egypt

By Anicée Gohar
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 7 2014 (IPS)

In the early 1940s, minorities like the approximately 80,000 Jews, or even the 200,000 Greeks, did not make up a big percentage of the total Egyptian population of roughly 19 million.

Regardless, they all made considerable economic and social contributions to the country, with some penetrating the political elite or even reaching celebrity status. Then, in the 1950s, the expulsion of thousands of Jews from Egypt turned all that around.

Released last week in the US, the documentary ‘Jews of Egypt‘ concentrates on the period of time between the creation of Israel in 1948, and the Sinai war in 1956 – known to some as the transition between the cosmopolitan Egypt of old and the modern Egypt of the 21st century, characterised by intolerance.

The popular “association of Arab Jews with Israeli policy is what caused the situation we are currently living in,” Amir Ramses, director of the documentary, told IPS.

Street interviews at the very beginning of the film show that a few years before the 2011 Egyptian revolution, right around the time the film went into production, many Egyptians did not know about Egyptian Jews, and the few that did rejected them as “Zionists”.

The fervent, post-independence nationalism of Egypt’s former President, Gamal Abdel Nasser, saw the imposition on Egyptian Jews of a no return policy, forcing the minority population to abandon their nationality if they ever wanted to leave the country.

For many Jews, the new directive was akin to being trapped between a rock and a hard place. Few wanted to leave, but as the country turned increasingly intolerant, they were left with little choice. Police detentions and religious fundamentalism was leading to the sequestration of businesses and properties, and life in general was becoming unbearable.

Though many fled to Europe and Latin America, Jews of Egyptian origin who were interviewed in the film testified that many tried to stay in their country as long as possible, reluctant to renounce their identity or assume Israeli citizenship.

Some, like the notable Henri Curiel, founder of the Communist Democratic Movement for National Liberation, even continued to support anti-colonialism in the Middle East even after their departure, but never obtained any recognition from the Egyptian government.

Arab scholars have complained that they have had no place in the narrative of the story of Egyptian Jews. It was either told through Western rhetoric falling under the banner of anti-Semitism, or it was buried under the carpet by Egyptian national authorities.

Khaled Fahmy, chair of the history department at the American University in Cairo, penned an article for a national newspaper last year, alleging that records of the Jewish exodus are nowhere to be found in the Egyptian National Archives (ENA).

“It is very sad to be a dozen of a kind between millions who forgot that [a Jewish community] still exists,” Magda Chehata Haroun, the president of the Jewish Community of Cairo – that counts less than 50 members today – told IPS.

Chehata Haroun said Amir Ramses is working on a second documentary on the same topic, which will have to be the last one since there will soon be no more Egyptian Jews to film.

The director of the documentary noted that, since the revolution, groups of enlightened Egyptians have begun to embrace the diversity of their national identity, a necessary development for the future of Egyptian minorities.

Man hauls water at the Chico Mendes landless peasant camp in Pernambuco, Brazil. Credit: Alejandro Arigón/IPS

By Anicée Gohar
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 21 2014 (IPS)

Increasing global demand for energy will affect the already acute fresh water shortage, according to the latest World Water Development Report (WWDR) launched in Tokyo Saturday on the occasion of World Water Day.

The report highlighted a glaring lack of coordination between energy and water management systems, despite the fact that places where people have inadequate access to water largely coincide with those where people have no electric power.

More than 750 million people in the world have no access to clean water, and more than a billion people are not connected to an electric power grid.

Improving access to those vital resources means recognising the interdependence of water and energy for sustainable development, said Irina Bokova, director-general of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

Energy production accounts for roughly 15 percent of water withdrawal annually. By 2035, that number will rise to 20 percent due to population growth, urbanisation, and changing consumption patterns.

Similarly, declining water resources also have direct repercussions on the demand for electricity, which is expected to rise by 70 percent by 2035, mostly due to developments in India and China. Already those two countries are home to the largest number of people without access to water: 108 million in China and 99 million in India wake up every morning knowing it will be a life or death search for that precious resource.

Electric power plants, which produce 80 percent of the electricity worldwide, need large quantities of water for the cooling process. Water is also guzzled during energy production and for the extraction of fossil fuels. Likewise, the collection, transport and treatment of water consume massive quantities of energy.

Meeting the power challenges means creating systems that allow for the combined production and management of water and electricity, concludes the World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP), which produced the report.

The report also provides pricing solutions for the crisis, suggesting that the two resources be sold at rates that reflect more accurately their cost and environmental impact. Current water prices hardly reflect the true cost of provision, keeping in mind that it is an essential resource for all life on earth. Higher prices could encourage energy producers and users to value and save water, experts say.

Improving water and energy efficiency means embracing methods such as energy generation through water recycling. Such projects are already being implemented and are likely to spread in the future. In Chile, for example, the Farafana plant treats 50 percent of the wastewater of Santiago, producing alternative energy for 100,000 residents.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Friday that water and energy “interact with each other in ways that can help – or hinder – our efforts to build stable societies and lives of dignity for all.”

Credit: Honor Diaries

By Anicée Gohar
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 17 2014 (IPS)

As hundreds of women gathered at the United Nations headquarters for the 58th annual Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), a screening of the award-winning documentary “Honor Killings” last week raised more than a few eyebrows, and a heated debate on religion, culture and tradition.

Every year, an estimated 5,000 women and girls perish in so-called “honour killings” – acts of homicide against women by members of their own family or community for allegedly bringing “shame” upon them.

While there is almost universal consensus that the archaic practice must be buried forever, the international community remains divided over how to discuss the issue in the context of the cultural divide between Eastern and Western societies, with their unique views on women, sexuality and justice.

Raheel Raza, a well-known author and president of the Council for Muslims Facing Tomorrow, told IPS that some governments actually have a vested interest in keeping the practice alive for the sake of tradition.

In the film, written by Paula Kweskin, a group of nine women who have witnessed first-hand women’s suffering in the name of ‘honour’ focus on pushing for institutionalised change in countries that are still held back by a highly patriarchal mind-set that refuses to punish men for these crimes.

Those women activists from the affected countries believe that an attack on one is an attack on all.

On the other hand, there is a cultural divide that makes it difficult for women in the West to fully grasp the reality of this practice. “The concept of honour is difficult to explain to Western societies,” says Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Founder of Aha Foundation and co-producer of the documentary.

“The most hostility I get is from Western feminist groups,” Raza added. She thinks they either are afraid to shake the status quo, or attribute honour killings to a distant cultural or religious problem that can be dealt with by the Muslim organisations working “on the ground”.

However, Raza argues that at a time where cross-cultural marriage is so widespread and globalisation part of our daily lives, it is very much a collective problem.

Jasvinder Sanghera, who has been fighting against honour killings and forced marriages in the U.K. for years, expressed her concern that human rights abuses will not end if they are labelled as “other people’s problem” by governments in countries like Canada or the United States.

Throughout the film, women challenged the political correctness that can paralyse many and act as an obstacle to identifying, understanding and addressing the international human rights disaster.

Tinatin Khidasheli, a member of the Georgian parliament who spoke on the panel, urged all politicians to raise the debate and address the issue “starting from school books”.

Libyan women experts with U.N. permanent representatives of Libya and Italy at “Libya ’s Forgotten Women Speak Up” event. Credit: Omar Ihwainish

By Anicée Gohar
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 14 2014 (IPS)

As is the case in many parts of the Middle East, women in Libya are facing disillusionment in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

During the 2011 Libyan revolution the world witnessed women from all backgrounds taking to the streets in towns and cities across the country, as well as the flourishing of thousands of women-led non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

However, the armed clashes between rival militias, crime and kidnappings, bombings and assassinations that have become almost routine in post-revolution Libya, territory, women have been forced to take a step backwards.

Farida Allaghi, president of the Libyan forum for civil society, said women are the most affected by the insecurity despite the fact that they never took up arms themselves. They are the ones with clean hands, she stated, which should make them the best moderators of a peace process.

Instead, women’s representation has been deteriorating. Libyan women went from forming 17.4 percent of the parliament to only 10 percent of the newly appointed constitution assembly, with only six women out of the 60 members.

Azza Al Maghur is the only female lawyer who is a member of the February committee appointed by the General National Congress (GNC) to draft an amendment to the 2011 Constitutional Declaration to set up the procedure for parliamentary and presidential elections. She said the Tunisian and Egyptian constitutions have been strong examples for the shaping of the Libyan draft, a crucial reminder of the importance of phrasing when it comes to women’s rights.

At a side event of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) here, representatives of NGOs spoke up against using insecurity as an excuse to disregard women’s issues. If women are not on top of the agenda during this transitional period, they said, they might never be.

Besides, women made up around 47 percent of the voters in the GNC elections in July 2012, which shows their hunger for participation in the changing politics.

Maysoon Tughar, financial advisor and supporter of Libyan women NGOs, said things were easier for women during the revolution because people had a common enemy, the 42-year-old dictatorship. But now that it is over, “the enemy is within ourselves”, she said.

The women gathered with representatives of the governments of Libya and Italy and U.N. Women to call for increased support and world solidarity at the crucial time of drafting a new constitution for the country, which will determine the basic principles for Libyan women’s rights.

By Anicée Gohar
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 6 2014 (IPS)

“Women entrepreneurs reinvest about 90 percent of their revenues back to their community, compared to 40 percent for men,” Arancha Gonzalez, Executive Director of the International Trade Centre (ITC), said Thursday.

The ITC has established the Ethical Fashion Initiative (EFI) aimed at promoting fair wages for dignified work in the fashion industry in Africa and Haiti.

Some of the most marginalised groups, essentially poor female artisans, have been linked to some of the top fashion houses in the world like Stella McCartney, Vivienne Westwood, and Marni.

Under that initiative, the organisation has not only trained women through the stages of production, but also offered assistance for women’s economic independence by encouraging them to open their own bank accounts or familiarise them with business models and entrepreneurship.

According to the World Bank’s 2013 database, 38 out of 141 economies helped establish equal legal rights for women and men in key areas to female entrepreneurship such as opening a bank account, getting a job without permission from their spouse, and owning and managing property.

Simone Cipriani, head of the EFI, thinks it should be a core component of fashion to care about the future of human kind and their environment because fashion is about quality and about people.

In addition to satisfy fashion’s necessity to be fairer, the concept of ethical fashion is profitable. Gonzalez said, “Our work is not just ideological but very much economic”.

The initiative claims to give work to skilled artisans to get valuable products in demand, while never coercing artisans to endure excessive overtime hours or undignified conditions.

While 20 percent of the micro-producers involved earned less than a dollar a day before, they gained more than four dollars a day with the initiative.

The Poor Communities Trade Programme of the ITC, under which the initiative operates, aims at involving micro-entrepreneurs in the developing world with international and regional trade.

As of today, 650 companies worldwide have signed and taken commitment to support gender empowerment principles of the UN. The EFI said more can be done, and they were committed to promote more local designers as well as increasing regional export capacities.

With the upcoming International Women’s Day on March 8, the United Nations would welcome such initiatives. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the initiative “develops local creativity, fosters predominantly female employment and empowerment, reduces poverty, and promotes gender equality.”

South Sudan and the Central African Republic (CAR) have become the sites of some of the worst refugee and internally displaced person (IDP) situations Africa has ever seen, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said Tuesday.

Some 1.8 million people were forcibly displaced due to the crises in both countries. Of these, 196,000 Sudanese fled to neighbouring countries, while 740,000 remain displaced inside Sudan.

Similarly, in the CAR, 290,000 people have sought shelter in other countries whereas over 700,000 people are internally displaced.

According to the UNHCR, IDPs are among the world’s most vulnerable people. This is in part due to the fact that, unlike refugees, IDPs have not crossed an international border to find sanctuary, but have remained inside their home countries.

“Even if they have fled for similar reasons as refugees (armed conflict, generalised violence, human rights violations), IDPs legally remain under the protection of their own government – even though that government might be the cause of their flight,” UNHCR noted in a statement released here.

Moreover, meeting even basic needs such as clean water is a constant struggle for many of these people. The UNHCR estimates that more than half of CAR’s 4.6 million people are currently in need of humanitarian aid.

Food security has also become a major challenge.

“Many children under the age of five are showing varying degrees of malnourishment, also related to lack of food in CAR. Over the weekend, 15 malnourished children died before they could be saved,” UNHCR Spokesperson Melissa Fleming said Tuesday in Geneva.

A 2013 report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) states that, as of last year, almost 44 million people had been forcibly displaced worldwide. Of these, 27.5 million were IDPs, 15.4 million were refugees, and 800,000 were asylum-seekers hoping to achieve refugee status.

By the end of 2012, the region with the highest number of IDPs was sub-Saharan Africa, while the country counting the largest population of IDPs was Colombia — with anywhere from 4.9 to 5.5 million – followed closely by Syria, with three million displaced.

Current funding for the twin emergencies in the CAR and South Sudan remains insufficient, according to the UNHCR. While the U.N. is seeking 551 million dollars for 2014 humanitarian efforts in CAR, only 112 million dollars have been allocated to refugees and IDPs in the country, of which just nine percent has been received so far.

For South Sudan, the global refugee agency requested 55 million dollars from the U.N. to meet the needs of displaced people, but only 12.4 million dollars of the pledged total have actually entered the country.

The United Nations Monday commemorated the first-ever World Wildlife Day dedicated to the preservation of the world’s fauna and flora.

“The diversity and beauty of wildlife is not just here for the pleasure of our eyes, but it is also what allows us to survive on this planet”, Achim Steiner, executive director of the Nairobi-based UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said in a message released here.

The 193-member UN General Assembly last year declared March 3 World Wildlife Day, as it is also the date of the adoption of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

However, the world’s wildlife is in crisis, according to conservationists worldwide.

More than 30,000 African elephants are slaughtered every year just for their tusks, many of those tusks end up in richer countries like the United States, the world’s second-largest market for wildlife products. Frequently, local communities are left at risk in the process.

At a meeting at U.N. headquarters Monday, member states asserted their commitment to combat the illegal wildlife trade, which is the second-biggest threat to species survival, after habitat destruction.

Kenya, a country that depends on tourism for 20 percent of its annual economic growth, warned that wildlife is a crucial attraction for tourists, and that trafficking is becoming “more organised and widespread than ever before”.

Moreover, according to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, “wherever illicit trade exists, we find links to corruption, transnational organised crime, and even insurgency and terrorism.”

While it is extremely difficult to put numbers on illegal trade, the Wold Wildlife Fund (WWF) estimates it is worth billions of dollars. There are records of over 100 million tonnes of fish, 1.5 million live birds and 440,000 tonnes of medicinal plants in trade in just one year.

In South Africa alone, over 1,000 rhinos were poached in 2013, a reminder that greed, corruption, fraud, and weak policy enforcement enable wildlife crimes on a massive scale.

Gabon insisted on the urgency of tackling wildlife crime for the endurance of “scientific and pharmaceutical research, ecotourism, and the self-empowerment of indigenous people, especially women and youth”.

In fact, all sorts of species of wild animals ranging from insects to antelopes or monkeys are exploited for food especially in rural communities where wildlife often constitutes the major or only source of animal protein.

Other threats to wildlife include global warming, acid rain, air pollution, deforestation, and other land-use changes for agriculture and urbanisation.

Among the roughly one hundred ‘world’ days declared by the U.N., World Wildlife Day is important because it is “an opportunity to celebrate the beautiful and varied forms of wild fauna and flora and to raise awareness of the multitude of benefits that conservation provides to people”.

It is also an occasion to simply be reminded that we are not the only specie living on this planet; in fact, we have become the one that has most threatened other species.

“We are not looking for a leader to rule us, because everyone who went to Tahrir Square is a leader. We are looking for a conscience,” says Ahmed Hassan, protagonist of the Oscar-nominated Egyptian documentary ‘The Square’, which was screened at the United Nations headquarters Tuesday.

The explosive documentary – based on over 1,600 hours of footage shot over a period of nearly three years – chronicles the Egyptian revolution from its start in January 2011 up to the summer of 2013 with the ousting of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Morsi, through the eyes of several Egyptian activists, by following their journey around the famous Tahrir Square.

Among them is Ahmed Hassan, a born storyteller and revolutionary from the working-class district of Shobra; Khalid Abdalla, British-Egyptian actor and filmmaker; Magdy Ashour, father of four and member of the Muslim Brotherhood; Aida El Kashef, filmmaker from Cairo who set up the first tent in Tahrir Square; and Ramy Essam, dubbed the “singer-songwriter’’ of the revolution.

These dynamic narrators take the audience on a tour of the chaos that was reported through minute-by-minute blog posts, Facebook updates and Twitter feeds, relating the story of Egypt’s revolution behind the headlines.

Those involved with the making of the documentary say this is a crucial time to remind the world of the human side of a struggle that is now being depicted as an endless series of power struggles, acts of terrorism and violence.

“If you think of what’s come out of the civil rights movements [in the U.S.], you think about Martin Luther King, you think about people who were really struggling to change things on the front lines, you think about the art and the music, and this beautiful energy that exploded and that is what should be treasured and spread around the world,” Director Jehane Noujaim said in an interview with IPS.

When asked about the future of the country, Producer Karim Amer told IPS that the youth who played a major role in the uprising are starting to reject the “old story” that Egyptians have been fed for years: that they must choose between the protection of the military or the purity of religious leaders.

“I think most young Egyptians see beyond that,” he said. “They see that there is an Egypt for Egyptians and are looking for someone who would put Egyptians first. The race towards that has started and there is no going back.”

“There are squares erupting in Ukraine, Turkey, Greece, in the U.S., so it was really hitting on the zeitgeist of our time to portray what it means to be one of those characters and their relationship with that piece of public space,” Noujaim added.

The documentary was screened at the U.N. by the Beirut Institute and the U.N. Correspondents’ Association (UNCA). It is on Netflix and currently playing in theatres in over 40 countries. In Egypt, however, viewers are still waiting for the censorship board to officially release the film.

Some have circumvented the state by finding alternative channels through which to view the narrative about their own lives. In fact, Amer says the process of gaining access to the film has itself become “a subversive act.”

The production team estimates the online views in the country to be over one million already.

Whether it wins an Oscar or not, ‘The Square’ is already a success and is spreading across the globe, with Hassan’s quote on “conscience” being tweeted in dozens of languages.