In its 2024 programme, Wellington Film Society is playing two 2022 films set in North Africa: Cairo Conspiracy (a European production set in Egypt) and Ashkal (from Tunisia). Both films deal with the fallout from the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ that unfolded during the prior decade. Johnny Crawford explores the way this ‘decade of protest’ has had its impact on cinema in recent years, and how Hollywood’s treatment of the subject is vastly different from its treatment in international film.
In his book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, Vincent Bevins looks at protest movements that erupted in the 2010s across the world: Brazil, Ukraine, Hong Kong, Turkey and the Arab world. He asks the question: “From 2010 to 2020, more people took part in protests than at any other point in human history. Why has success been so elusive?”
Interviewing activists who had participated in many of these protests, Bevins puts forward theories as to why so few of these movements achieved their stated aims (spoiler alert: it’s complicated). One thing that does become clear over the course of the book, though, is that the very idea of grouping all these movements together is itself an over-simplification. Just because there were protests around the world in a ten-year period doesn’t mean they were part of some wider historical force. Even the idea that disparate protests in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain could be packaged together and called ‘the Arab Spring’ in Western media is a bit of a convenient narrative…
…but nobody loves convenient narratives like Hollywood.
Hollywood cinema has long had influences on international protests. The title of Bevins’ book comes from the phrase “If we burn, you burn with us,” a quote from The Hunger Games books, which was adopted by anti-CCP protestors in Hong Kong in 2019. Adapted as a series of popular young adult films that were released between 2012 and 2015, The Hunger Games depicts a dystopian future where young adult contestants in a violent game show mobilise to overthrow an authoritarian government. The influence of this series could be seen, not just in the streets of Hong Kong, but in cinemas with an influx of Young Adult dystopian films that decade. Viewers could watch teens standing up to power in films like the Maze Runner, Divergent, The Giver, Ender’s Game or The Darkest Minds, some of which were adaptations of much older books.
The revolutionary promise of the early protests might have fizzled out over the course of the decade but it was ubiquitous in cinemas. In addition to the Young Adult boom, we saw apes rise up against their human captors in 2011, rebels undermine a galactic empire in 2016 and the damn Joker inspire a populist uprising against capital in 2019. Each of these were entries in long-running Hollywood franchises that put anti-authoritarian themes at the forefront, in line with the flavour of the moment.
This fascination was not limited to the Hollywood blockbuster: a number of international filmmakers also tapped into the revolutionary zeitgeist and the result are some of the best films of the decade. Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer (2013), Kornél Mundruczó’s White God (2014), Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama (2016), Pablo Larraín’s Ema (2019) and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Bacurau (2019) each address the idea of popular uprising. Some of these films, though, go a step further in problematising the straightforward Hollywood narratives of overthrowing evil governments. Nocturama in particular, (one of my favourite films of the decade) depicts an ideologically-ambiguous revolution where any concrete motivation for the protagonists is secondary to their millennial angst. They are doomed to fail.
As described by participants interviewed by Bevins, this failure took different forms in different countries. COVID-19 frequently made mass gatherings unsafe. A backlash took hold with a number of countries (especially in the west) electing hard-right political parties and prompting centre-left political parties to move enthusiastically towards the right. In the Arab world, the governments that took power following the uprisings did not always have much in common with the protestors who’d stood in opposition to the previous governments.
With major (Avatar: the Way of Water) and modest (The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes) exceptions, the on-screen revolution seems to have fallen out of vogue in the 2020s. Superhero movies provided a reactionary counterpoint to these types of films throughout the 2010s and continued confidently into the new decade. These days, a character who wants to overthrow the system and create a better world is very likely to get beaten up by Black Panther, Batman or Thor. Real life protest movements have been bigger than ever, especially in support of Palestinian people over the last year, but they don’t seem to have the backing of Hollywood.
This brings us to the two ‘Arab Spring’ films in Wellington Film Society’s 2024 programme. Cairo Conspiracy is about Adam, a young man who gets caught between various political actors vying for power at Al-Azhar university. He must juggle the competing interests of parties like the military, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian deep state (all of whom have been major actors in Egyptian politics over the last decade). There is no sense that Adam can simply overthrow a bad Grand Imam and put a good one in his place, the best he can hope for is to save his own neck and – if he’s lucky – the lives of his family and other ordinary Egyptians. The film doesn’t directly depict any of the political upheaval that has taken place since the 2011 Tahrir Square demonstrations but its cynical depiction of competing interests in Egyptian politics is clearly informed by the aftermath.
Ashkal, on the other hand, is explicit in its invocation of the previous decade’s protest movements. The Tunisian revolution, the ‘Arab Spring’ and the decade of protest began in earnest in 2010 when a vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzid as an act of protest against government harassment. Working within the framework of a spooky serial killer procedural (think Silence of the Lambs or this year’s Longlegs), Ashkal follows two Tunisian detectives Batal and Fatma, trying to solve a social contagion of self-immolation in the outskirts of Tunis. Twelve years after the death of Bouazizi, any optimism that has lingered from that initial wave of protest has curdled into something nastier: violence without the promise of a better future. What was a violent plea for a better future has become the imagery of an unsettling present.
The historical import of the 2010s is yet to show itself. There were certainly a lot of massive protests but these can be seen not so much as an international movement but a series of specific movements. These may have inspired and influenced one another, but the similarities have been over-emphasised in Western media and movies. Film might be imprecise as a document of historic forces, but it can be really instructive to see how prevailing vibes and moods have shifted in response to these forces.