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The chapter provides historical background information on film and politics in Egypt. Cinema in Egypt goes back to the end of the nineteenth century, and it has a long and rich tradition. I will trace the complicated relationship between cinema and the state from the birth of Egyptian national cinema into the Mubarak era. This projection of a historical timeline highlights the persistent conflict between films’ attempts at (re-)presenting socio-political content and the state apparatus’s power of censorship. I will address various examples of films and filmmakers that faced censorship in different phases of recent Egyptian history: the monarchy, the Nasser era, Sadat, and finally the Mubarak era. Examples will be discussed in relation to censorship and, most importantly, in relation to filmmakers’ strategies of representing their socio-political ideas, criticism, and sometimes their attack on the state in terms of filmic language: symbolism, realism, and Egyptian neorealism.

This chapter discusses the first eighteen days of the Egyptian uprising in which I apply the definition of counterculture as an assemblage of the war-machine kind. Counterculture is the assemblage in which culture is no longer separated from its active forces and through which the excluded possibilities are empowered and enforced. Counterculture is a social machine of the virtual as opposed to the state which is the owner of the world of actuality. Here, I will focus on the infamous first eighteen days of the uprising. It is the intensity and the rapidness of the events which led to the change in the Egyptian socio-political scenery that make these eighteen days a perfect example of how a war-machine is formed and how it acts. This is also the very period upon which the whole medial and in part some scholarly narrative was built.

Answer the questions: Can film be a space in which countercultural flows are articulated and if so, how? What kind of image would be suitable for this articulation? Thus, the chapter engages in an in-depth analysis and close reading of five Egyptian films which were produced between 2010 and 2016: Ahmed Abdallah’s Microphone (2010), Rags and Tatters (2013), Hala Lotfy’s Coming Forth by Day (2013), Tamer El Said’s In the Last Days of the City (2016), and Mohammed Diab’s Clash (2016). Each film will be analyzed through three systematic lenses: (1) Narration, (2) Cinematic Language and the Representation of Reality, and (3) Rebellion. I end Chap. 4 with the section, New Egyptian Cinema, which took shape post-2011. I name a few films produced between 2010 and 2019. This artistic space which had its roots in the long cinematic tradition of Egypt was enabled and enhanced by the uprising.