Film

The Square

Name: The Square
Genre: Documentary, Drama, History
Released: 2013
Cast: Khalid Abdalla, Dina Abd Allah, Dina Amer, Magdy Ashour, Ramy Essam

Jehane Noujaim's camera doesn't leave Tahrir Square for years, and neither, really, do you. It's less a history lesson than a lived experience — tear gas, songs, arguments about tactics, funerals, hope curdling and reviving. Verité, urgent, unresolved by design. For anyone who thinks revolutions end when the dictator falls, this is the corrective.

TMDb rating

7.6

If you liked this

Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom2015

Same square, same tents, same terrifyingly familiar arc from peaceful sit-in to state violence — except this time it's Kyiv's Maidan, and the stakes turned out to be even larger than anyone filming it knew.

But It hits nearly identical beats to The Square; watching them back to back can feel repetitive rather than additive.

Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom poster

Five Broken Cameras2011

A Palestinian farmer films his village's nonviolent resistance year after year, camera after camera getting smashed or shot. It's intimate where The Square is crowded, one family instead of a movement.

But Slower and more domestic — if you wanted the scale and chaos of a mass uprising, this is a quieter, sadder register.

For Sama2019

A young mother in besieged Aleppo films her own life — marriage, birth, bombs — as a letter to her daughter. The most devastating and tender thing on this list, bar none.

But It's genuinely harrowing, unfiltered footage of a city under siege; this is not one to put on for background company.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Battle of Algiers1966

The Square's visual language — jittery cameras, mass crowds as the true subject, violence erupting mid-frame — descends directly from this film, which was famously studied by insurgents and armies alike for how uprisings actually move through a city.

Shot in grainy black-and-white with non-actors on real Algiers streets, this 1966 film about anti-colonial insurgency invented the documentary-realist grammar The Square inherits — handheld chaos, crowd as protagonist, no clean hero.

But It's nearly sixty years old and structured like a tactical case study; expect fewer personal arcs, more strategy and street warfare.

The Act of Killing2012

Indonesian death squad leaders re-enact their own mass killings for the camera, cheerfully. It's the flip side of The Square's question — what happens when the people who hold power never lose it.

But Deliberately, queasily surreal rather than observational; some viewers find its stylised approach to atrocity hard to sit with.

No Country for Old Men2007

A dramatized account of the ad campaign that helped vote Pinochet out of power, shot on grainy period video to blend with real archival footage. Political change through a completely different, sneakier mechanism.

But Fictionalized and comedic in places — a lighter touch than The Square's raw urgency, which may feel like a tonal mismatch.

Silvered Water2014no page yet

A collage of citizen-shot footage from besieged Syrian cities, assembled with a filmmaker's eye for what it means to watch a country destroy itself in real time on phone cameras.

But Formally experimental and unrelentingly bleak — there's little of the camaraderie and dark humour that lightens The Square.

Waltz with Bashir2008

An Israeli filmmaker animates his own fractured memories of the 1982 Lebanon War, hunting for a truth his brain has buried. Documentary conscience wearing an unexpected, haunting shell.

But Animation distances you from the immediacy that makes The Square work; if you want raw footage, this trades it for metaphor.

Restrepo2010

Embedded with American soldiers at a remote Afghan outpost, this is verité filmmaking of the same unflinching, camera-in-the-thick-of-it school, minus any narration telling you how to feel.

But No political framing or hope at the end, just exhaustion — a bleaker, more claustrophobic watch than The Square.

Persepolis2007

Where The Square is a revolution happening in real time, Persepolis is that same kind of upheaval refracted decades later through a single life — same disillusionment when hope curdles into a new authoritarianism, told in an entirely different visual language.

Marjane Satrapi's animated memoir follows a girl growing up through the Iranian Revolution and its aftermath, funny and furious in equal measure, proving revolution can be remembered in ink and still cut just as deep.

But Black-and-white animation and a coming-of-age structure are a world away from The Square's handheld urgency; it's memory, not reportage.

V for Vendetta2006

It takes the exact engine of The Square — ordinary people flooding a public square to unmake a government — and runs it through genre fiction, trading documentary uncertainty for catharsis, which throws into relief how messy and unresolved the real thing actually is.

A masked vigilante incites a city to rise against a fascist government, culminating in a crowd of identical masks filling the streets outside Parliament — the same mass-uprising imagery, staged as pop spectacle.

But It's glossy studio filmmaking with a script full of speeches; anyone who found The Square's mess and ambiguity essential may find this too tidy and triumphant.