Prayer of Fear, September 2013

Mosireen

04 mins 25 secs

After Rabaa nobody knew what to do. The brutality of the attack was astonishing, but it was the reaction of some parts of the public that was truly paralyzing. The worst massacre in modern history had been committed in broad daylight, in Cairo, live on television and there were people celebrating.

As a collective of filmmakers we had no response. We were not there, we had not risked our lives to film it. We had fallen out of the equation of power in the stand-off between the Army and the Brotherhood. We were powerless and yet we felt complicit. We were racked by a confusion and guilt and impotence. We sat stunned in our office day after day, smoking, silenced.

Then Mahmoud Ezzat published his poem, Prayer of Fear. Within days we had this video. It was the last great collaborative video of the group and it remains, for me, one of our most important, most sincere works. We are still living in the shadow of that moment.