General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Square (الميدان) (2013 film)

The Square (الميدان, Al Midan) is a 2013 documentary film directed by Jehane Noujaim that follows the Egyptian revolution from the January 2011 uprising in Cairo's Tahrir Square through the following two and a half years, including the election of Mohamed Morsi and his removal by the army in July 2013.¹^•² It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 86th Academy Awards.³

Key fact	Detail
Director	Jehane Noujaim, an Egyptian-American documentarian whose earlier films include Control Room and Startup.com¹^•⁴
Subject	The Egyptian revolution in Tahrir Square, from the fall of Hosni Mubarak in 2011 through the ouster of Mohamed Morsi in July 2013²
Runtime	104 minutes per the AFI catalog; festival listings give 95 minutes and one review gives 88 minutes¹^•⁵^•²
Countries and languages	Egypt, the United States, and the United Kingdom; Arabic and English¹^•⁵
Principal figures	Ahmed Hassan, Khalid Abdalla, Magdy Ashour, Aida El-Kashef, and Ramy Essam⁶
Major awards	Academy Award nomination (2014); Sundance and Toronto audience awards (2013); three Primetime Emmy Awards (2014); DGA Award for documentary directing³^•⁷
Distribution	Netflix acquired the film in late 2013 as the first title in a documentary slate and streamed it that winter⁸

Spoilers

Content and subjects

The film opens with the victorious 2011 protests that removed President Hosni Mubarak, then follows the protesters' realization that removing a regime's leader does not end its power, as they return to the streets against government corruption.¹⁴ It is built around several recurring participants, described by Film at Lincoln Center as one member of the Muslim Brotherhood and four liberals; among them is the actor Khalid Abdalla, known for Green Zone and The Kite Runner, who often serves as an English-speaking spokesman for the revolutionaries.⁴^•² Ahmed Hassan, a young man from the working-class neighborhood of Shobra, emerges as a central voice; Magdy Ashour is the Muslim Brotherhood member caught between his organization's political calculations and his own conscience.¹⁵^•¹⁶ The film also features the protest singer Ramy Essam and the graffiti artist Ammar Abo Bakr.⁶^•¹⁷

Critic Godfrey Cheshire, reviewing for RogerEbert.com, observed that the film's structure reflects a triangle of forces, the army, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the people, and noted that its verité style, without commentary or expert analysis, can leave some nuances of the shifting political situation hard to grasp.² A Washington Post review criticized the film's portrayal of the Muslim Brotherhood as one-sided, arguing that it recycled negative stereotypes about the movement's supporters.¹⁸ An OpenDemocracy review noted that the June 30 protests are covered briefly and that the Rabaa massacre is only mentioned in passing.¹⁷

Production

Noujaim was in Egypt when the uprising began in January 2011 and lived near Tahrir Square. She found it difficult at first to assemble a crew from outside the square, so she built the team from young revolutionaries who were already filming there.⁹ Noujaim and her crew spent 20 months shooting in the square during the uprising against Hosni Mubarak; they were regularly threatened, and at one point Noujaim was arrested and temporarily "disappeared".⁴ An Egyptian account describes her detention during the Mohamed Mahmoud street clashes of November 2011: a military police soldier smashed her camera, accused her of espionage and of throwing Molotov cocktails, and held her for 36 hours before releasing her after verifying her identity.¹⁰

The film was cut from hundreds of hours of footage.⁴ After a version screened at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the World Cinema Documentary Audience Award, Noujaim returned to Egypt, filmed through the summer, and prepared a revised version that added the turbulence surrounding the army's removal of Morsi, whom the film treats as Mubarak's popularly elected successor.¹¹^•² Toronto festival audiences gave the new cut their own audience prize in September 2013.⁸ After the Sundance win, Noujaim also ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund continued filming; a later academic study describes the film as the first crowd-funded feature to be nominated for an Academy Award.¹²^•¹³

Reception and awards

Critical response was strongly positive. Rotten Tomatoes reports a 100% Tomatometer from 70 reviews and an 89% audience score; Metacritic lists a Metascore of 84 from 21 reviews, all positive or mixed, with none negative.⁶^•¹⁹ Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the film "bears witness to history in an articulate, thoughtful and intensely dramatic way", and A.O. Scott of The New York Times called it revelatory despite depicting widely covered events.¹⁹

The film's awards include the Sundance World Cinema Documentary Audience Award and the Toronto People's Choice Award for Documentary in 2013, the Muhr Arab Award for Best Documentary at Dubai, the IDA Award for Best Feature, the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary, the Amnesty International Film Prize at the Berlinale, and three Primetime Emmy Awards in 2014 for Outstanding Directing, Cinematography, and Picture Editing for Nonfiction Programming.⁷^•²⁰ At the 86th Academy Awards, held March 2, 2014, it was nominated for Best Documentary Feature alongside Noujaim and producer Karim Amer; the award went to 20 Feet from Stardom.³

Release and availability

The film opened in New York on October 25, 2013 and in Los Angeles on November 1, 2013.¹ In November 2013, Netflix executives made it the first acquisition of what the Los Angeles Times described as an ambitious documentary slate, with a planned streaming release that winter.⁸ An Egyptian report noted that the film was scheduled for the Cairo European Film Panorama in November 2013 but was not shown, officially for technical reasons related to the print's readiness, while others said it was withheld because it embarrassed the military institution then governing Egypt.¹⁰ One festival-catalog account states the film was banned in Egypt.²¹ As of recent listings it streams on services including Fandor and Cineverse Amazon Channels and Tubi, with rentals from $1.99.²²

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026