“We use images like a weapon to fight for social causes,” says a man in the trailer for INSIDE OUT: The People’s Art Project, a new documentary that airs on HBO tonight. The doc tells the story of JR’s INSIDE OUT, a global art project in which anyone, anywhere, can send the artist a portrait and have a poster-sized version sent back to them for pasting in public spaces. JR's TED Prize wish: Use art to turn the world inside outSince the project’s launch in 2011, when JR received the TED Prize, these oversized black-and portraits with a faded polka dot motif in the background have become a fixture on the walls, fences and sidewalks all around the world. To date, more than 130,000 INSIDE OUT posters have been pasted in more than 100 countries.

INSIDE OUT: The People’s Art Project, directed by Alastair Siddons, isn’t about untangling the identity of JR  – who always appears in public wearing Ray Bans and fedora. Instead, it aims to show how people around the globe have made this fascinating project their own. Yes, cameras show JR in his Paris studio but, from there, they travel to Haiti, where photographer Benoit has pasted up dozens of images of those living in tent cities following the devastating earthquake of 2010. The message: that while hardship continues in the country, people remain infused with hope.

The film goes on to bring viewers to North Dakota and the West Bank, where major INSIDE OUT actions have been launched, as well as to Tunisia, where portraits of everyday people are revolutionary in and of themselves. “We were always seeing pictures of the dictators,” says an INSIDE OUT artist in the country. “Now it’s people—Tunisians.”

INSIDE OUT: The People’s Art Project premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York in April. And tonight, the film makes its television debut on HBO at 9pm ET/PT. The documentary will also be available on demand through June 30. Find out more about the film and its airdates at HBO’s website »

See JR interviewed about the documentary by Christiane Amanpour last Friday »

Are you or someone you know interested in launching a worldwide project on the scale of INSIDE OUT? Nominations for the 2014 TED Prize are open, from now until June 16 »

By Marianna Torgovnick

Some documentaries show us the strange, the exotic and the unfamiliar; others make us feel anew about something so everyday, we barely thought about it before. Some of my favorite TED Talks are built around great documentary films, like Deborah Scranton’s chilling “War Tapes” and Nathaniel Kahn’s moving search for “My Father, the Architect.”

Last week, I attended the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina, a four-day bash featuring more than a hundred documentaries — new, classic, and invited — many of which will show theaters over the next year.

Below, find my nine favorite films from the festival, which no documentary fan should miss.

1. Stories We Tell (director Sarah Polley, 2012)
An invited film that has shown at festivals in Toronto and New York, Sarah Polley’s gorgeous documentary is structured liked a mystery in which trap doors keep opening. Once an actress, the still-young Polley has directed two feature films: Away from Her, and the enigmatic Take this Waltz. Stories We Tell literally turns the camera on Polley, her family and her friends in a quest to find the truth about her mother, who died of cancer when Polley was eleven. The youngest child in her family, Polley’s questions interrogate the meaning of love, marriage, parenting, fidelity, the meaning of fatherhood, and the possibility of creative chaos. If that sounds like a lot, it is. But this beautiful and cunningly structured film is not just wonderfully crafted — it is also haunting and evocative as Polley’s family history becomes a metaphor for, well, the stories we tell and what we mean when we tell them. Part documentary, part fictional recreation of the past, this film is 100% worth seeing.

2. Muscle Shoals (director Greg “Freddy Camalier, 2012)
A new documentary that has the impact of a musical freight train, Muscle Shoals chronicles the men and stars behind Fame Recording Studios in the small Alabama town called Muscle Shoals. Narrated by Bono (watch his talk, “The good news on poverty”), Keith Richards, Percy Sledge, Aretha Franklin, Alicia Keys and others, the film features interviews with founder Rick Hall and his surprising back-up band, The Swampers, a group of local white teenagers. They looked, as the film says, like they worked at Walmart, but found within themselves the miraculous ability to endow singers like Franklin – not to mention bands from the Stones to Traffic — with a missing ingredient called soul. The Swampers eventually become Hall’s rivals, but the film wraps the whole story in glorious music and feel-good imagery. This Southern place exudes a special charm keyed to the rhythms of the Tennessee River and its green fields. Less known than it should be to music lovers, Muscle Shoals documents a center of the music scene that rivals Motown.

3. Our Nixon (director Penny Lane, 2013)
If you could have been a fly on the wall in the Nixon White House, what would you have seen? Our Nixon answers that question by culling recently available home videos made by Doug Chapin, H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, all indicted during the Watergate scandal, all forced to resign from office and all (who knew?) avid cameramen. We don’t really see a more nuanced and likeable Nixon than popular lore records, but we do see and hear him more intimately than ever before. In one tiny image, he’s slumped into an armchair, his suit enveloping him as though it’s three sizes too big, in a way that epitomizes how this hard-working — and even talented — President was consummately a man lacking charm and grace. Near the end, Haldeman, who has resigned and is facing prison, calls a lonely Nixon, who is facing impeachment. “I love you boy. I love you like a brother,” Nixon says. You realize that this band of men, deservedly under the shadow of a history they failed to understand, had friendship and bonds of love rarely seen before in public.

4. The World According to Dick Cheney (Showtime, 2012)
Political junkies at the film festival moved on from Our Nixon to The World According to Dick Cheney, which revisits some of the most disastrous events of the George W. Bush presidency and documents the rift between Cheney — once an unchallenged force within the White House — and the President as his popularity plummeted. Part apologia, part expose, I list it as a must-see that will be available soon both on Showtime on Demand and on Netflix.

5. Manhunt (director Greg Barker, 2013)
An HBO Documentary Film that will be shown in May, Manhunt is not so much the anti Zero Dark Thirty as it is an alternative version. Taking a longer historical view, it focuses on the CIA’s twenty year search for Osama Bin Laden from the time when his disturbing messages first began arriving via video to his death in May 2011. It includes statements that most Americans never heard as a way of suggesting that Bin Laden’s death, rather than a cause for celebration — as it was for crowds in front of the White House that day — has left many questions unanswered. Two of the CIA agents shown — women in roles parallel to Jessica Chastain’s in Bigelow’s film — have since left the agency and participated in the documentary because, as one said at the Q&A after the screening, “History should not be dictated from the top.” A must-see for an informed public that remembers the World Trade Center attack of 2001, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and everything that has happened since.

6. American Promise (directors Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster, 2013)
The directors began filming their 5-year-old son, Idris, when he enrolled at the prestigious Dalton School along with his childhood friend, Seun. Both African American and from solid middle class Brooklyn families, the boys seem at first to experience bumpy rides at a mostly white school, adjusting unevenly to diversity. But the film rather quickly moves beyond race to raise questions about the parents’ frenetic belief that every quiz, every paper is a make-or-break moment in their son’s rise to a productive adult life. One boy stays at Dalton; the other goes to a self-defined all-black private school instead. As it follows both families and their sons through 13 years, the film manages not just to raise questions about the families and their choices — but also to make you really care.

7. Cutie and the Boxer (director Zachary Heinzerling, 2012)
Hard drinking and hard hitting Japanese artist Ushio Shinohara is turning 80 and is a reformed alcoholic as this film opens in New York, where he shares an apartment with his much-younger wife, Noriko, also an artist. Their relationship has had its ups and downs, illustrated both through home videos and shots of the couple and their adult son in their messy apartment and studio — where the rent is, it seems chronically, overdue, despite Ushio’s success. We see them negotiate with the Guggenheim and mount an exhibit of Ushio’s latest work — a stylistic breakthrough — and of Noriko’s cartoon series based on their marriage, where the character named Cutie is Noriko herself. A tribute to marriage, love and the power of personal growth within a long-term relationship, this is a handsome and well-made film that is a portrait of two artists as well as of marriage.

8. The Record Breaker (director Brian Mc Ginn, 2012)
At just 25 minutes, this hilarious and well-made film is less than a feature and more than a short. It wins hands-down as the funniest documentary of the year. With affection and good humor, the film chronicles the daffy and obsessive activities of Keith Furman, who renamed himself Ashrita when he began to break records in the Guiness Book to honor his guru, Sri Chinmoy. We see Ashrita catch malt balls in his mouth and then catch malt balls in his mouth while riding an elephant. We see him slice apples with a samurai sword and other hilarities, aided and abetted by a group of pals who cannot resist his child-like energy and zeal. Most of all we see him train to climb to Machu Picchu on stilts, a feat most people find challenging enough on foot. The authorities ultimately turn him back but Ashrita remains, as his father (who once disowned his son but now embraces him) says, “the happiest person I know.” Whether the malt balls or the samurai sword get you most, this film should make your day.

9. A Will for the Woods (directors Amy Browne, Jeremy Kaplan, Tony Hale, Brian Wilson, 2013)
Hard to see and hard to take, this documentary has the potential to affect not just individual viewers but the American way of death. Smart, articulate psychiatrist Clark Wang is dying of lymphoma and knows it when he attempts to arrange a “green burial”: no embalming, no vault-like coffin, no institutional feel or machines—just a grave in an open, protected landscape so that he can perceive his coming death and decay as part of a natural process and it can unroll that way in real time. The documentary visits “green cemeteries” in the U.S. which preserve landscapes and make the conservation of the land in perpetuity a gift of the burial. In some extremely painful sequences, we see Clark die and his wife wash his body. Then we witness burial in a simple wood coffin and a hand-filled grave topped by natural greenery in a patch of North Carolina woods that are a protected part of a more traditional cemetery run by a caring and committed woman. Small now, the movement seems destined to grow. Their elders owe the young filmmakers a debt for making this difficult but must-see documentary that will be available online at AWillfortheWoods.com if it does not find distribution. Rather than being a downer, the film won — perhaps surprisingly — the Audience Choice award.

Marianna Torgovnick is a Professor of English at Duke University and the director of the Duke in New York Program. Author of the books The War Complex and Gone Primitive, you can read much more of her work at MariannaTorgovnick.com.

William Kamkwamba: How I harnessed the wind

William and the Windmill, directed by Ben Nabors and starring TED’s own Tom Rielly, who became Kamkwamba’s mentor, follows Kamkwamba’s journey from his home in Malawi to Dartmouth College, reflecting on the highs and lows of living between two very different cultures. As IndieWire writes in its rave review of the film, “Kamkwamba’s scientific achievement speaks for itself, but the attention he received in its wake is a thornier issue that Ben Nabors turns into a fascinating look at the tricky balancing act of third-world activism.”

William and the Windmill received recognition last night at SXSW alongside Short Term 12, winner of the Grand Jury Award for Narrative Feature. Below, check out stills from William and the Windmill, courtesy of Nabors. And stay tuned to the TED Blog for a Q&A with Kamkwamba.

Director Ben Nabors accepts the Grand Jury Award on Tuesday night at SXSW.

A still from the film: William hard at work on his windmill.

A still from the film: A windmill from afar.

A still from the film: William, deep in contemplation.

Here, watch the film’s trailer:

And head to the Tribeca Film Institute website to read about 5 films that influenced Nabors as he made this doc »

William Kamkwamba built a windmill out of spare parts to provide electricity for his family in rural Malawi, after seeing a similar design in a library book. It’s an incredible story — one that set TEDGlobal 2007 ablaze. William Kamkwamba: How I built a windmill Now, Kamkwamba is the subject of a new documentary, William and the Windmill, which makes its world premiere at the SXSW film festival on Sunday, March 10. It is up for the festival’s Documentary Competition.

Directed by Ben Nabors, William and the Windmill begins with Kamkwamba’s incredible feat of engineering but focuses on what happened after — as Kamkwamba becomes one young man straddling two cultures. It follows him as he travels to TEDGlobal, meets with renewable energy experts in the United States, enrolls in a pan-African high school, publishes a book and founds the nonprofit, Moving Windmills, which aims to bring schools, clean water, solar power and scholarship programs to his area. The film even follows Kamkwamba on a media tour, as he films segments on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Good Morning America.

William and the Windmill is an exploration of how ingenuity ripples out through the world, and the intense pressure that builds as this happens. As Kamkwamba says in the trailer, “My pressure comes when I’m thinking about, ‘Yeah, I did this and I did this. So, now what next?’ Maybe people out there, they’re waiting. Expecting a lot of things from me.”

When Nabor and TED’s own Tom Rielly took to Kickstarter in 2011 to raise the funds to edit this film, pledgers donated more than $111K. So if you’re at SXSW, make sure to see it. And stay tuned to the TED Blog for a Q&A with Kamkwamba and information on when you can see this doc.

Edith Widder: How we found the giant squidFascinated by oceanic cephalopods (like octopus and squid), deGruy and his team were the first to film two rarely seen creatures — the nautilus and the vampire squid — in their home oceans. So it’s only fitting that when he met Edith Widder aboard the Mission Blue Voyage in 2010, their talk quickly turned to squids. As Widder details in her new TED Talk, deGruy was the reason she found herself on a Japanese expedition to waters south of Tokyo, where she helped film the giant squid for the first time. She has dedicated this talk to him.

Below, watch Mike deGruy’s TED Talk from Mission Blue, as well as two more TEDx talks from this wonderful storyteller.

Mike deGruy: Hooked by an octopus
In this talk from Mission Blue, deGruy tells the moving story of his love for filming the oceans.

Mike deGruy: Lost in the Crowd: A Simple Biology Problem
In 2010, Mike spoke about his passion for the planet in a great talk from TEDxAmericanRiviera that stemmed from his work in the Gulf after the oil blowout.

Mike deGruy: The Evolution of a Spark
In this six-minute film from TEDxAmericanRiviera, meet 10 passionate young people from Santa Barbara who show us how they live big and go after their dreams. They inspire their peers, and even our adult generation, to take pause, wonder, remain curious and playful, and feel that contagious spark that comes from unbridled youth

Last night at TED2013, the Motion Picture Association of America hosted a nighttime discussion on the topic of how film has shaped some of modern day’s most cutting-edge technology. John Underkoffler: Pointing to the future of UIThe prime example: John Underkoffler’s user interface inspired by his work on Minority Report.

We were joined by Industrial Light & Magic, the visual effects division of Lucasfilm, responsible for films like the Star Wars, Harry Potter, Indiana Jones and Mission Impossible franchises. The aim of their work is primarily to inspire people with new fictional technologies, but even to encourage longing for those technologies to exist. Lucasfilm Chief Strategy Officer Kim Libreri and Industrial Light & Magic Art Department Creative Director David Nakabayashi discussed how technology gets involved before a script is even written. In the case of Minority Report, Spielberg consulted 50 scientists to ask them what the future would look like. And it seems films can even inspire real-world technology — they gave the example of digital surgery, which was inspired by The Matrix.

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Martin Villeneuve’s Mars et Avril is a luscious sci-fi film, set in Montreal 50 years in future, where the subway line takes you straight to Mars. It’s a dreamy love story in which the acting is top-notch, the shots are stunning and the visual effects unreal. And Villeneuve made it all for $2.3 million. To put that in perspective, Star Wars Episode III was shot for an estimated $133 million.

“I made a film that was impossible to make, only I didn’t know it was impossible,” says Villeneuve in Session 6 of TED2013. “This is the kind of movie I wanted to make ever since I was a kid, reading comic books.”

So how did he make the movie? Well, it took seven years.

“When you don’t have money, you must take time,” Villeneuve says. “The more problems we had, the better the film got.”

Villeneuve, like Phil Hansen, says that constraints boost creativity. The first constraint he faced: He wanted Canadian superstar Robert Lepage to be in the movie, but Lepage only had a few days available for filming.

“How do you get someone who is too busy to star in a movie?” asks Villeneuve on the TED stage.

The answer: he turned Lepage’s character into a hologram (At 0:13 in this clip, see how Martin solved the problem). He gave another actor a mask of greenscreen material, and had him stand in for Lepage in scenes. The greenscreen was then replaced with Lepage’s face and voice, meaning he could play the part.

Constraint #2: “How do you pay for something that you can’t afford?”

Villeneuve needed seven not-yet-made musical instruments, inspired by women’s bodies, for the movie. Only he had no budget for them. So he got someone else to pay for it — he sold the hypothetical instruments to Cirque du Soleil and got to use them in the movie for free. And he presented an artist friend with a dream project, in creating these wildly imaginative props.

Constraint #3: How do you get top-notch visual effects?

Villeneuve’s answer — you ask the best people in the field if they’ll do it. Even though his budget was tiny, Villeneuve approached his effects heroes, offering them the opportunity to dream rather than money.

“If people tell you it’s impossible, it’s an even better reason to want to do it,” says Villeneuve. “People have a tendency to seek the problem rather than the final result. If you treat the problems as possibilities, life will start to dance with you in the most amazing ways.”

See the trailer for Mars et Avril below.

Safwat Saleem puts out a global call to the bemused, disappointed and outraged. Photo: Ryan Lash

On Monday on the TED Fellows stage, Safwat Saleem made the crowd roar and squirm with his art – satirical and profane posters and animated shorts skewering racism, the absurdity of politics, petty dishonesty and general stupidity. In a word, bullshit. Here at TED2013, he’s launching a new project, called “Pardon Me, but WTF?” – a call to the general public for their own stories of bullshit, an act of public catharsis which Saleem will curate and make into art.

What exactly are you looking for? Do you have examples of the kind of bullshit you’re looking for. What constitutes bullshit in the first place?

I don’t want to say. I’m being ambiguous on purpose because I have a strong feeling that, six months into it, strong themes will begin to emerge and I’ll base the rest of the project on those themes.

My art was mostly about race and social injustice and immigration issues and Islamophobia – all the things that I thought were bullshit. It’s very political. But the stuff that I’ve been getting from others is much more personal. Someone’s father left them 10 years ago and they never heard from them again, for example. But also it’s very mundane stuff. One lady sent in a story that her 3-year-old pooped his pants, and she asked him, “What’s going on? Why did you poop your pants?” And he said, “It’s not my poop. I didn’t poop in my pants.” And she goes, “Well, then whose poop is that?” And he goes, “It’s Daddy’s. Daddy pooped in my pants.”

So it’s funny stories and it’s serious stories. I feel that, when it’s done, it will be kind of like This American Life meets Post Secret, where we’ll learn about each other through art. That’s the goal.

So you’re going global. Global bullshit?

Global bullshit. Exactly. All kinds of bullshit collected together. That’s the plan. I’d love to hear your stories of bullshit, absolutely. So please visit my website, and submit your story.

http://vimeo.com/60231606

Al Gore warns on latest climate trends Al Gore, who has given three TED Talks in total, won Best Documentary for An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. Three years later, at TED2009, he showed the latest climate data, revealing that damage to the planet was accelerating more quickly than expected. He also offered a potential solution: clean coal.

Rob Legato: The art of creating awe Rob Legato has won multiple Oscars for Best Visual Effects — for Hugo, Titanic and Apollo 13. At TEDGlobal 2012, he gave the talk “The art of creating awe,” revealing snippets of how the memorable effects in each were created. He also shared his penchant for recreating moments that actually happened on film. (See Legato’s picks for the 5 movies that floored him visually.)

Andrew Stanton: The clues to a great story Director Andrew Stanton won Best Animated Feature for WALL-E and Finding Nemo. He also gave the talk “The clues to a great story” at TED2012. His bold idea: starting at the end and working back to the beginning.

James Cameron: Before Avatar ... a curious boy James Cameron has been nominated for six Academy Awards and won three. Known for his ability to create engrossing worlds, in the talk “Before Avatar … a curious boy” at TED2010, Cameron shares why he has long been enthralled by the fantastic.

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy: Inside a school for suicide bombers The 2012 documentary Saving Face follows a plastic surgeon as he journeys through Pakistan, performing reconstructive surgery for women who’ve been the victims of acid attacks. The powerful film won the Oscar for Best Documentary. At TED2010, director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy — a TED Senior Fellow — shared footage from another project, taking us “Inside a school for suicide bombers.”

Jane Fonda: Life's third act Jane Fonda won her first Oscar for Klute in 1971, and her second for Coming Home in 1978. At TEDxWomen 2011, the actress and exercise video enthusiast shared her thoughts on “Life’s third act.”

Jeff Skoll makes movies that matter At TED 2007, Jeff Skoll gave us the one rule he has for picking projects to produce: that they must be movies that matter. Skoll’s film company, Participant Media, has made five Oscar winners, including Syriana, An Inconvenient Truth and The Help.

Don Levy: A cinematic journey through visual effects Don Levy took us through a cinematic journey of visual effects with the help of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at TED2012. The head of marketing and public relations for Sony Pictures Imageworks, he led the awards campaigns for the studio’s first win, for the short The ChubbChubbs in 2003, through their win for Best Visual Effects for Spider-Man 2 in 2005.

Other TED connections worth noting:

• Producer Jake Eberts — known for taking on bold projects like Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, Dances with Wolves and March of the Penguins — has been involved with the making of movies that garnered 66 Oscar nominations, including nine Best Picture nominees. Eberts sadly passed away in 2012, but before his death, often showed film clips at TED — generally unposted because the footage was embargoed. Here, a recap of his talk from TED2009.
• Morgan Spurlock, who gave the talk “The greatest TED Talk ever sold” at TED2011, was nominated for his documentary Super-Size Me.
• Composer James Horner won two Oscars for his work in Titanic, including Best Original Song for “My Heart Will Go On.” Horner desconstructed a scene from the epic film at TED2005.
• Jeffrey Katzenberg, founder and CEO of DreamWorks Animation, spoke several times at TED in the early days. His company made Beauty and the Beast, the first animated film to be nominated for Best Picture, and won Best Animated Feature Film in 2001 for Shrek.
• Producer Lawrence Bender, whose films have gotten 29 Academy Award nominations in total, has also spoken briefly at a TED.
• Ben Affleck, who created a playlist of his favorite TED Talks, directed and starred in Argo — nominated for seven awards this year, including Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay.
• Longtime TED community member Philipp Engelhorn got a Best Picture nod this year for Beasts of the Southern Wild, which he executive produced.

Egyptian filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won the TED Prize in 2006 with a wish to bring the world together for one day using the power of film. Her most recent work, The Square, saw her heading back to Cairo to track events in Tahrir Square as the Hosni Mubarak regime fell. While there, she filmed a group of local revolutionaries who had also been drawn to the tumultuous events, including the actor Khalid Abdalla and Aida El-Kashef, a cofounder of Mosireen, a media center dedicated to creating citizen journalism during the revolution. The documentary tracks the charismatic group of individuals through their time at the height of the revolution, and continues to tell their stories even after many of the other revolutionaries had moved on from Tahrir Square.

The Square won the Sundance Audience Award in the World Cinema Documentary category earlier this year, and Noujaim and her team are currently running a Kickstarter campaign to fund the post-production of the film, including editing and further filming. After all, this is a story that is far from over.

I caught up with Noujaim and the film’s producer, Karim Amer, to talk about the film, the achievements of the revolution, and what’s still to come in this newborn democracy.

What are you hoping to achieve with the film?

Jehane Noujaim: I hope people see this is not only a story about Egypt. This is a story about struggle and about fighting for your beliefs and putting everything on the line to fight for what you believe in. That story is interesting when the big news cameras cover it, when you have the entire country behind you — but when the cameras go away and most of the country and state television are calling you prostitutes and thugs and are not behind you, that can be some of the most interesting footage. It really shows what has to be sacrificed.

Are you hopeful for the revolution?

JN: Definitely. But this is a very difficult time right now, and it’s going to be a long process. I don’t think that we’re going to see some of the results for 5, 10, 15 years. This was a fairytale, to expect that in 18 days or two weeks, people in a square were going to be able to bring down a dictator and his entire regime. In a way, by bringing down Mubarak, a lot of the people that were fighting lost the symbol of what the revolution was fighting for. So it became even more difficult after Mubarak stepped down. But what they’re fighting against is the removal of a regime, and that means changing the system. That means dealing a major blow to the entrenched systems that are in place, and that includes the army, the police state, the  former regime, and the Muslim Brotherhood … not because of religious reasons, but because what the Brotherhood tried to do when they got into power was a massive power grab, and so it’s really been a fight against another dictatorship.

You first started working on the film in 2011. In The Square it’s apparent that since then there’s been a change in morale among the revolutionaries. Can you talk a little about that?

JN: The revolution goes in waves. There are times in the film when our characters are completely depressed. There are wins and then there are many times when they feel like the battle’s been lost, and they have to keep reminding themselves that it’s a long struggle. Look at the Civil Rights Movement. Look at any kind of fight for change. People had to keep fighting and taking their rights. Rights are never given to you. They have to be fought for and they have to be taken.

Karim Amer: I think a lot of people we’ve spoken to from Western media outlets are kind of gloomy on the revolution’s outlook, but when we talked to our characters … it took over 30 years to make people realize what Mubarak’s regime was doing and to galvanize enough of a movement to get him out of power. It took over a year and a half to do that with the military. Now, the Muslim Brotherhood’s in power with the first freely elected president, and less than 6 months later, people are back in the streets. Our characters see it, and we see it, as progress. People are starting to react much more quickly to acts of injustice. That’s the new Egypt that many of the people in this movement and in our film are shaping and paving.

So uprising and violence are actually signs that things are improving?

KA: We’re not saying that violence is a sign that things are improving. What I’m saying is that reactions to injustice leading to massive action of people showing their power…

JN: Ideally nonviolent.

KA: …is an act of improvement. You’re going to try to jam the constitution through illegally? Well, we’re not going to stand for that. The action-to-reaction time is improving.

JN: Before Mubarak stepped down, when a massive injustice took place, if you tried to have a conversation with somebody in the street, with a taxi driver, anybody, people would not even speak about it. People were afraid to give their opinions even though they knew that there were massive injustices happening. And even after he stepped down it took a year [for conversations to start happening.] You see in the film, the army was torturing people in the Egyptian museum, but it still took people about 8 months to stand in the street and to say to their army that they would not stand for this any more. And then when Morsi did his power grab, it took them, what, two weeks? Two weeks to go down into the streets. That is a massive change from the Egypt I grew up in.

KA: It is a complete paradigm shift in terms of the mentality of the people. People are no longer living in a culture of fear.

How have things in Egypt changed since you were young?

JN: Probably the biggest change is really seeing people realize that the government is supposed to work for them, rather than them having to be victims of whatever the government decides to do.

KA: Egypt is an epicenter of centralized states. Egypt is the land of the Pharaohs. We’ve been living under a Pharaonic-type of society for 5,000 years. What changed was a huge shift in people’s expectations of their leadership and their expectations of  the future they want to live. That’s why we know that regardless of the short term outcome, the revolution has been successful.

Clearly not everyone from the revolution is pleased with Morsi. Do you think he’ll stay in power?

JN: Right now there aren’t the checks and balances that are in place in the United States or other democracies, so the people gathering in protest around the palace are Morsi’s checks and balances. My hope is that people will continue to express themselves and educate the rest of the country on their rights. But I don’t think that Morsi is about to be ousted anytime soon.

KA: The goal isn’t, like, the continual ousting of people. We’re trying to create a system. Right now a new social contract is being formed. The goal is that any attempts for Morsi to become a dictator are curbed, and that he recognizes the power of the people. If he fails to do that, then I think, yeah, he will not last. But I think that the outpouring of pressure against him is really making him check this again, especially because the Muslim Brotherhood is losing so much support from their own people, who are very disappointed.

JN: In the film, one of our characters starts something called Mosireen, which means “adamant,” and basically it gets cameras out to people to film injustices. One very powerful piece that they filmed later was at a protest at the presidential palace when Morsi did his power grab. A number of Brotherhood supporters trashed the tents in front of the palace, took people, and tortured them. Somebody managed to videotape it. In these torture videos, the Brotherhood supporters were saying, “Who’s paid you to be here? You’re a thug.” That was Mubarak’s exact playbook.

As we watch this happen again, the feeling you get is not that Morsi himself is going to be the savior and change things, but that people are going to keep fighting against the dictatorship and against this kind of rule.

Jehane, I know you spent some time in jail during the filming. What were some other personal challenges that you both faced in making the film?

KA: Of course, Jehane was arrested 3 times throughout the process.

JN: Everybody on the team has been arrested, shot at, or chased by soldiers or police.

KA: Cameras confiscated I don’t know how many times.

JN: We’ve had many cameras confiscated, a lot of footage taken, so that’s probably the most obvious, but we still managed to get all of the footage out of the country and to put a film together.

KA: When you’re documenting something that’s so close to home, what’s at stake for everyone in the film, the whole team, is your country. Your country is being reshaped and redefined, and you have the ability, hopefully, to make some kind of impression of that through the film. So there’s a lot at stake, and there’s a lot of emotion. One of the characters, Ahmed, told us that this film to him is the truth that must be preserved. He said, our generation and our parents’ generation grew up in a country where history was written by whomever was in power, and they could write and say whatever they wanted. This film is our ability to show an alternative version, to preserve the truth of what happened in this square, and he said, if this film succeeds, then our kids will live in a country that’s free.

And I’m like … okay … that’s a lot to put on the film. [Laughs] I mean, we’re happy it means so much, but that’s a huge burden.