Mainstream news can only do so much to record history in the making. News crews are large and obtrusive; news stories report the overarching facts. As participants reporting on hand-held cameras and cell-phones, award-winning filmmakers Omar Shargawi and Karim El Hakim picked up what the camera crews missed of the Tahrir Square demonstrations in Cairo last year. Their film, 1/2 Revolution, closes the gap between the action Americans saw on the news and the emotion and characters of the protests. 1/2 Revolution made its North American premiere at the 2012 Sundance film festival, and there will be three screenings at this year’s True/False Film Fest. Both directors will be in Columbia for the festival.

The Hollywood Reporter called the film a “visceral, verite personal documentary focusing on 11 days of the 18-day revolution [that] captures the ground-level events with a gut-churning immediacy and veracity often missing from news reports.” This emotional proximity to the protestors is exactly what the filmmakers were hoping to portray by keeping characters’ emotions a main priority in editing. “People watching the film get sucked in and experience moments as the characters do—they feel they are there, along for the ride, just out of frame,” El Hakim told Sundance. “This emotional bond allows the audience to not only watch the story as an observer, but also feel the emotions of the characters as a participant.”  El Hakim also said he considers the film  more of an “anthropological examination of people under the stress of a revolution—how they behave, what they fear and the hard choices they constantly make to survive and struggle to stay united,” than a story about the revolution. Both filmmakers have Egyptian backgrounds, but they also hold foreign passports—a duality mirrored in their roles for the film. Both men are at once stars of the film and filmmakers, participants and observers of the revolution. Thus, they capture both what happens on the streets and in Tahrir Square and the conversations that go on behind closed doors.

During their time in Cairo, Egyptian authorities treated the pair just like a any other protestors. “I was shot at (I got hit with a rubber bullet to the head), arrested, beaten-up, intimidated, photographed and followed during the filming process,” El Hakim told Indiewire. The film’s trailer gives a better sense of what Shargawi and El Hakim went through:

“A camera is perhaps the only weapon people have against countering the sheer brutality and impunity of a police state,” El Hakim told Sundance. “But it also takes an international audience that is willing and able to listen, and able to act on its collective outrage, that is the real driving force for influencing change.”

While 1/2 Revolution may complete the circle of news reporting and personal experience, a peek at news headlines over a year later suggest that the filmmakers were right: the protests in January were only one half the revolution.

—Natalie Cheng