From Behind the Monument Jasmina Metwaly

This is a short film about a relationship between the image, the spectacle and the spectator: the confrontation between the audience and the image. The narrative is built around a story of a street called Mohamed Mahmoud and the battle that happened there between the protesters and the riot police in 2011 in Egypt. This film is an essay that speaks about the aftermath of an event creating a third reality for an understanding of what happened. It is not the street, the TV screen, but the reality of an abstracted space, such as a museum that allows for a different reflection and submission to a story that by itself creates a new form of representation. This story is about how political images are turned into spectacles of the reality and how representation fails to go beyond its nature. It is also about an attempt to become an active participant in the event and the fear of touching the unknown. In the aftermath, we all become the spectators.