Cairo is deceptively calm, says Egyptian film-maker Mohamed Diab. ‘People were so scared from the fighting in the streets that now all they want is stability at any price,’ he explains. ‘But if you look closely at the situation, it’s worse than it was with Mubarak in charge when it comes to freedom of speech, freedom of the press and human rights.’
It’s not turned out quite how Diab had hoped. In 2010 he directed Cairo 678, a riveting film that in hindsight seemed like a premonition of what was to come. A New Yorker article in 2011 described it as ‘unmistakably a harbinger of [the] revolution’, and commended Diab for ‘vividly portraying how the old system failed repeatedly to address daily indignities and frustrations suffered by ordinary Egyptians, women in particular’. When Tahrir Square erupted in early 2011, Diab became a leading participant (he rejects the term ‘leader’) in the revolts that unseated Mubarak.
‘I was lucky that Cairo 678 had just been released so I had the opportunity to talk on TV every day,’ he says. He became so associated with promoting the revolution that people began to recognise him more as a political activist than as a film-maker.
They were heady, hopeful days for young people like Diab. Soon after, he started work on a film about the revolution but was compelled to change tack dramatically as the democratic moment turned sour and autocracy returned.
On a sweltering August day in 2013 an Egyptian policeman fired CS gas through the window of a prison truck that had been driving aimlessly around the capital because all the prisons were full. Thirty-seven people suffocated to death. The incident became the key inspiration and spur to his latest movie, Clash.
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