Information Access

I was supposed to be on a plane to Palestine yesterday. I was due to start filming my next short, Though I Know the River is Dry.

But it became very clear to me on Friday night that the work we're doing with Tahrir Cinema is important. An old man in a suit, his head bald, his beard long and grey, came up to me to with his hand held out, gripped and shook my hand firmly to thank us all for the work we're doing. He's from Tanta, he has his young daughter with him, they've come up to Tahrir for the day. For months he's had the feeling he's being lied to by state TV and now, seeing the footage of January 28th up on the makeshift, wood and plastic screen, he knows for sure.

He tells me we need to bring the cinema to Tanta. Or, if we can't do that now, then we need to give him all this footage. He wont leave until he has a copy. He will show everyone he works with, everyone will watch.

At least five people came up to me that night with different ideas, proposals, requests about how to spread this material. Each one said it was vital that people get to see it.

Later that night @cairocitylimits pointed out that we forget what intense information access we have. If you're reading this blog, you're probably pretty comfortable looking up a video on YouTube. But that's nowhere near the case for everyone. So we are now working overtime to establish ways of getting this material out to the rest of Egypt, of having screens set up in every city of the revolution, of DVDs and USB sticks getting distributed. The images  are so powerful that they can tell you everything you need to know about the Revolution in an instant. The task now is getting them seen.

Who knows, maybe we can set up a distribution system that we can inherit and continue beyond the Revolution, when we go back to focussing on fixing the film industry. What is known, is that my own film is going to have to wait for now.