Tahrir: Liberation Square

Instantly proves itself an invaluable historical document. Shot verite-style with no narration, soundtrack or other embellishments, Tahrir: Liberation Square simply depicts the events of late January and early February 2011 with a vital immediacy.

It's an exhilarating, though unfocused, look at how the country reached its tipping point, one that feels unfiltered in ways both good and bad. It's a collection of striking images rather than a considered whole.

A direct-cinema document of the Cairo protests that toppled Mubarak, Stefano Savona's film doesn't pretend that Egypt's resolution has yet won a lasting victory.

Far from imposing clarity on the historic gatherings, Tahrir embraces the thrill and uncertainty of popular action. In some ways resembling old-fashioned vérité, Stefano Savona's chronicle aims to plunge you into the crowds and clamor.

The variations are many, but the theme is as consistent as the crowd that grows and strengthens throughout Savona's inside, traditional, vérité portrait of the uprising.

The result may occasionally be more of a journalistic scrapbook than a Wisemanian all-points portrait, but the impact of seeing such unvarnished public activism in the raw can't be overestimated.