Wael Omar Sahib Filmmakers and activists

Where do you see the border between an activist and a filmmaker? I think the line becomes very clear when you are going down into the street and get involved both as an activist and as a filmmaker. The minute violence becomes sort of the order and is against the action that you are an activist for. Then it really becomes a fight or flight instinct. You boil down even further from an activist filmmaker to a protester to a human being who is being attacked, basically. Once bullets are flying and the tear gas is all over the place you tend to go to a more basic level. Am I going to fight these people or not?

What is your approach to expressing the relationship between history and film? The events that unfolded in January are best expressed by the mood captured by mobile phones. As far as the picture as well as the camera movement and the noisy microphone are concerned it captures the proximity, the rush of events and voices. Nothing transfers the information, the urgency and the feeling - whether it is panic, victory or danger - better.

How would you express your experiences during the revolution? The best 18 days of my life. Because of the height of every sort of emotion that is in your palette as a human being. It was a kind of self discovery being in a situation like this when you are notorious, under threat and have anticipations of the future and also this incredible hope. The euphoria and at the same time the disappointment. All of these emotions in such a small amount of time made us all very high. We were experiencing something that we couldn’t quite even understand ourselves. And I think that’s part of the nature of a revolution. It is something that is not completely set and you can’t tell when it will be settled. It was like the epitome of all the human feelings you could possibly imagine.

Do you have the impression that you changed the narrative over time? I don’t think we changed the narrative. I think narrative details are often changing slightly. Was it a proper revolution or was it an intifada, an uprising? Was this an uprising of the youth or was this a popular uprising? Is it even a revolution or a coup d’état? And outside of the context of the 18 days narratives are things that reveal themselves during the following months. And often they take us down one path and then another. We have to realize that the narrative is very much under construction. Yet we know it’s important to get at least a sense of it. You can’t be making a film unless you have a certain level of conviction that what you saying is true or real. I think that’s going to be the challenge for a lot of the filmmakers who are working with the elements of the revolution right now.

Which film do you find most striking when it comes to the revolution? It’s called 1/2 Revolution and is made by Omar Shargawi and Karim El Hakim. It’s about three filmmakers living downtown who are trying to make a film in a middle of a revolution. What I like about it is that it has a very subjective nature and is not necessarily only about the events. The only thing that matters is that there was an uprising and three people in the middle of this trying to figure out what to do: “Am I an activist or am I a filmmaker?”

What’s your opinion about the outcome of the uprising? We just had the parliamentary elections; we obviously had a second uprising begin last week. We are in a very strange period. It’s not a time of great hope, it’s tough. We are in a battle. Our main weapon is moral. Democracy wasn’t even a word we used in the first couple of days. The real quests of this revolution were bread, social justice and freedom. And by bread we mean an affordability of food and subsidies. We still don’t have any of these things. They are trying to cut the revolutionaries out of the game. The revolutionaries are still in Tahrir. They didn’t go vote. The uprising will continue until these things are addressed. So there is the sense of determination even if we are exhausted and disappointed and our moral is constantly being broken. We have the upper hand because we are younger. They are going to die, they are going to go, eventually. It’s going to be ours.

By Johannes Bennke