So I haven't managed to write anything for a while. After what happened at Maspero, it's hard not to feel like imagework is pretty useless. But everyone's got to keep doing their part and hope that the collective effort is stronger than rampaging APCs.
So this is a little of what we've been engaged in at Mosireen, Cairo's new, independent media centre. The first video got played on TV a few times and is being held up as part of the proof that the Army shot at people.
We're working on something longer that will hopefully be ready by the end of this week.
Amidst all the death, if there's anything to be thankful about it is, again, that we live in an age where crimes are easily recorded. We collected all the most relevant videos here. They paint a pretty damning picture.
The battleground now is over transmission. What can one do other than post videos on Youtube? I've been told ONTV did a survey and found that 85% of households in Egypt only watch State Television. The same state television that were imploring people to "defend the Army from armed Christians." Meanwhile, on the satellite channels, Mona Shazly read straight from the Army playbook in the SCAFshow - asking them why they hadn't "taken control" of the Ministry of the Interior and blocking Ibrahim Eissa from asking anything even remotely uncomfortable while Yousri Fouda has taken himself off air because he wasn't allowed Alaa al Aswany on his talk show. The spaces for dissent are being shrunk every day.
We continue to push online as hard as possible, and burn DVDs to be distributed, but our reach is short. Talk is in the air now of setting up a new, publicly owned television channel. We'll see if we can still carve out and protect a space for free speech yet.
****
In other news, I just discovered that Shadi Abd el Salam's masterpiece, The Night of Counting the Years, is available free online. So if you want to forget about SCAF for a couple of hours, here's an option. Scorsese's World Cinema Foundation recently restored a print, but this isn't it. It's pretty grainy (though not as grainy as the embed still would have you believe), but it'll do until we can get a copy of the restored version online.
So this is a little of what we've been engaged in at Mosireen, Cairo's new, independent media centre. The first video got played on TV a few times and is being held up as part of the proof that the Army shot at people.
We're working on something longer that will hopefully be ready by the end of this week.
Amidst all the death, if there's anything to be thankful about it is, again, that we live in an age where crimes are easily recorded. We collected all the most relevant videos here. They paint a pretty damning picture.
The battleground now is over transmission. What can one do other than post videos on Youtube? I've been told ONTV did a survey and found that 85% of households in Egypt only watch State Television. The same state television that were imploring people to "defend the Army from armed Christians." Meanwhile, on the satellite channels, Mona Shazly read straight from the Army playbook in the SCAFshow - asking them why they hadn't "taken control" of the Ministry of the Interior and blocking Ibrahim Eissa from asking anything even remotely uncomfortable while Yousri Fouda has taken himself off air because he wasn't allowed Alaa al Aswany on his talk show. The spaces for dissent are being shrunk every day.
We continue to push online as hard as possible, and burn DVDs to be distributed, but our reach is short. Talk is in the air now of setting up a new, publicly owned television channel. We'll see if we can still carve out and protect a space for free speech yet.
****
In other news, I just discovered that Shadi Abd el Salam's masterpiece, The Night of Counting the Years, is available free online. So if you want to forget about SCAF for a couple of hours, here's an option. Scorsese's World Cinema Foundation recently restored a print, but this isn't it. It's pretty grainy (though not as grainy as the embed still would have you believe), but it'll do until we can get a copy of the restored version online.
No comments:
Post a Comment