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hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk, i'm stephen sackur. freedom of expression is severely curtailed in egypt. journalists, bloggers, civil society activists and political dissidents have been locked up by the thousand under the sisi regime, which makes the egyptian movie ‘eshteba k‘, or ‘the clash‘ all the more important. the much—lauded film paints a remarkable picture of the tumult in egypt which led to the military takeover in 2013. the director is my guest today, mohamed diab. what has happened to the spirit of the tahrir revolution? mohamed diab, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. your movie—maker. how big, how deep breath do you have to take before making a movie in the day's egypt, particularly a movie that is about politics, society, culture in your country today? i'm going to tell you what everyone around me told me before making that film — don't.

everyone told me, even my family, everyone knew this film was going to explode in my face. making a politicalfilm or something that has a political statement, it's almost suicide. notjust because the government or the regime, it's because of everyone. we are in the midst of a big division in egyptian society, almost amounts to civil war. maybe the streets, people are not killing each other these days but at some point they did, and the hatred extends to every family member. egyptian families, the first rule of any family gathering is don't talk about politics. so, if everybody, yourfriends, your professional colleagues, everybody said don't, and you did, would it be right to characterise eshtebak the movie your act of resistance? i was part of the egyptian revolution and i stayed as an activist, a traditional activist, for almost three years but i think the most and the biggest

positive thing i've ever done is eshtebak, the clash, because it's talking about why we were in the streets in the first place. it's very evident when you see the film that it is praising unity and it's praising... it is anti—hysteria, anti—division, and there is no bigger message and more important than this message now in today's egypt. well, it's interesting you say it is anti—division. egypt today is such a polarised society. it is such a divided society. is it possible to make a movie which portrays those tumultuous events of the summer of 2013 when the morsi islamic government was, in essence, toppled by the military? is it possible to make a movie about that and not take sides? it depends on what film, why are you making that film. i'm making a film about coexistence, i'm making a film against hysteria and division, so the film is not trying to show any side as good or bad, it's trying to show us

all the human side in us. here is a thing. in the studio i have talked to egyptian officials, i've talked to egyptian human rights activists, about what happened in 2013 because of course it matters today to make sense of why the military took over and why we have the government that you guys have in egypt today. and the key question is for many people, was it a coup or was it not a coup? for you as a film director, portraying those events of summer 2013, do you have to take a view on that? i actually deliberately avoided talking about that in the film because this is the question you just asked that is a dividing question in egypt. egyptians are like half... if you said the word coup, there is no conversation any more, and if you said the words "it's a revolution," there is no conversation. isn't that a cop—out? you know, you are a film—maker, making a film about something deeply controversial that matters so much to egypt today, and you are saying

but ijust opted out of the key question. no, it depends on what film are you making. i'm making a film about coexistence, about humans, trying to humanise the enemy. everyone is seeing the other as the enemy, dehumanise the other. this is the first step in civil war and i'm trying to dissolve that. i'm trying to make a film that counters that. in order to do that, i had to humanise everyone, and that's what provoked people the most. humanise the other. and what is remarkable about your movie is the device you used to humanise the situation is so unusual. you film pretty much the whole movie from the inside of an eight—metre—square police truck. why did you do that? it was a metaphor of the feeling that everyone in egypt is feeling right now. we are all trapped and we are trapped together. are we going to get out? are we going to continue living? what are we going to do? i wanted people to experience the full experience of getting trapped inside a car like this, how brutal the situation is.

experience is the word. let's give everyone watching a brief taster of being inside that truck. let's watch a clip clip from the movie. i find it riveting. i have some experience as a foreign correspondent and being in riots that have turned violent in egypt. that to me looks so authentic, but what's really striking about it is that all the footage taken inside the truck, it's all chaos. you have no real way of knowing what the heck is going on. was that deliberate? maybe in those clips it is hard to determine what is going on, but in the film it was mapped out, how can we make the film understandable, especially for a foreign audience. so the car has 25 main characters and outside there is at least another ten. it was very important for us to make the film understandable for everyone and i think we did that. yet, to me the film is not about only the political situation in egypt, it's about the division

that is sweeping the whole world. you are going to feel that this film could have been about brexit, it could have been about clinton and trump, it doesn't matter. and in the films there is no political conversation of who is... everyone is explaining their side. it is just there is a division between three sides or two sides, and that is what the core of the film is about. and it forces people who have been raised to regard the other as the enemy to actually deal with each other as human beings because there they all are stuck in the back of this police truck, whether they happen to be muslim brotherhood islamists or they happen to be supporters of the military, whether they are young students, whether they are secular or religious, they are all in this mess together. exactly, and the film is just trying to remind us all, we don't have to agree on everything to coexist and unfortunately right now, in a crazy situation, people think we have to agree

fully in order to exist and that's completely wrong. the one thing you do, which i think is very difficult to do in egypt today, you humanise the islamists. they come in all shapes and sizes, literally. there's the young girl, the teenager who brings herfather along and she's inclined to support the brotherhood. there's the die—hard political activists from the brotherhood. there's those who were brotherhood but now have doubts about it. but the point is you humanise them. you say to egyptians and people all over the world, don't regard these folks as just terrorists or people who have one set of beliefs; they are complicated, they are mixed, they are just like the rest of us. that's actually the most important thing about this film i think to the west. this film, this has been big research, this is like a research study when you see that film. it's the first time you see the difference between the muslim brotherhood the way they are, the organisation from the inside.

you see the difference between a muslim brotherhood member and just a supporter. you see the difference between a jihadi and a salafi. those things you need to understand in order to talk about. at the end of the film, i don't want to just say everything, but at the end of the film some people turn into isis and this film took place before the rise of isis. so, you need to understand how did we reach that point. most of the people in the west think isis grow on trees or something. you need to understand how did they reach that point. and by the way, most of them, just like any heinous criminal in the world, in the beginning they were normal people. the other thing that you do is you portray the state in the form of the security police, who are obviously manning the van and going out and grabbing people, arresting them and chucking them into the back of the van, and on one level you are inviting us to take a pretty negative view of the state because that's the heavy hand of authoritarianism and that is depriving people of their freedom, but you also humanise some of the police. they are facing real dilemmas. there's a girl that wants to go to the toilet. does the policeman let her or not?

is that humane or inhumane? and you suggest that even the police are complicated, that there are divisions within them. that there are some who are very humane and some who are not. some people in egypt will say right now the state is simply repressive and you haven't portrayed it as entirely repressive. it is the same argument i said about the islamists or the muslim brotherhood, how i portray them in the film, it is the same argument to answer the police argument. you think you don't have any friends, anyone who is hearing. you don't have any friends who became police officers? were they really tough at the beginning? have things changed them? have they became more violent? if someone killed a friend of theirs or a police officer. there's a vicious circle of violence. you need to understand where people are coming from, and to portray people as just cartoonish characters who are just evil, who just do bad things with no motives, that is the most superficial portrayal of human beings and it's not benefiting anyone. let's not talk about the state as fictionalised in your movie,

let's talk about the state as you have to deal with it as a film—maker. let's talk about censorship. as i understand it, you were required as part of the deal to get distribution under licence in egypt to show the movie in your home country, you were required to put some captions up at the beginning, which read, "after the events of the june 30th revolution, bloody clashes took place, led by the muslim brotherhood, which were seeking to stop the peaceful transition of power." that would strike many as state propaganda against the muslim brotherhood. why did you agree to that? it is 100% state propaganda and i didn't agree to it. it is on the movie as seen by egyptians. i don't have control over the movie in egypt as the producer. from day one, in the premiere of the film i went on tv and on every tv channel i said, "people, discard this, this is wrong, i'm completely against it because the film is actually about coexistence.

it's not about propaganda to any side so discard this." but the producer had an ultimatum. i put this or there is no film. i disagreed, he didn't. would you have pulled the film? obviously not internationally but... i'm going to tell you why we made the film in the first place. we made the film in this time because this is the time when people are fighting and killing each other. it is the right time to tell them, don't do that. i would have made the film ten years later with no problem. people would have welcomed the film. so, to me as a film—maker, i was dreaming of the day this film gets released because it is not about cinema any more, it's about life and death. it is a hard choice. thank god i didn't have the final say in it, but for me from day one, i said i denounce that, i'm completely against it, and it is against the message of the film. do you feel intimidated?

definitely, i do, and i'm going to tell you what you just do you even today feel intimidated by the atmosphere in egypt, an atmosphere which sees impositions placed upon your creativity as we have just discussed? but also, frankly, thank goodness, you are here in the hardtalk studio, but many dissident voices in egypt today are locked up. thousands of them. do you feel intimidated? definitely, i do, and i'm going to tell you what you just mentioned, it's the smallest thing that happened to the film. a week before the release of the film, the distributor of the film got a call or i don't know what happened, but even though he put money in the film, he backed off and he said he's not going to distribute the film. he is scared. in egypt they pulled off all the posters of the film so it was actually... and at some point there was personal information about me and the producer leaked, and in a way that made us looked like spies. during the film festival in cannes, there was a ten—minute piece about me on egyptian tv, accusing me of being a spy. a parliament member went on tv

and said i am a spy. i have got some quotes here. one of the official tv stations, state—sponsored tv stations in cairo, described you as somebody who portrays egypt as a moving prison. it says that, through your works and social media accounts, you promote ideas that are hostile to the state. essentially you are being accused of treachery. there was one article that says art in the service of terrorism. i think if the article was right i should have been injailfor 25 years or something. when you read that sort of thing, do you think to yourself, "i can no longer be my creative true self, i can no longer make movies in today's egypt"? no, i know inside me it is going to be harder but i know i'm going to make films no matter what, even if in my room. i'm going to make films, i'm not going to quit. i always had a back—up plan for this film if i didn't have enough

finances or i didn't have the permissions for it. i would have shot it all in my house. i would have got that car... where did you shoot it? in the streets of cairo. and how much... how can i put it this way? how obstructive were some people to your efforts to actually film on the streets of cairo? the biggest obstruction was the people themselves. we were so scared that people mistake us for a real protest with police, if they took sides they might shoot us, if the police shoot the protesters, so it was a great amount of organisation and preparation. at some point we shot things like a flash mob. we are going to shoot in the biggest street of cairo with 1,000 extras, we are going to show up on film until someone stops us. and it happened. an hour later the police stormed the place, one guy got stabbed, the people attacked us. it is so intense, and that proved to me that we are talking about hysteria in the right time. you have got to have such a passion, such a drive, such commitment to keep doing this sort of thing

in such a difficult situation, which egypt is today, and we will get back to egypt today injust a minute. butjust on the personal front, i'm wondering if you are always convinced it is worth it. because i'm thinking about the earlier movie you made, just before the tahrir uprising, all about the violence directed against women in egypt today, sexual violence. you called it cairo 678. again, it's won acclaim internationally but the horrible depressing truth is that even though the movie was seen by some egyptians, it seems to have made no difference to that particular problem in egypt today. i completely disagree. i'm going to tell you exactly how it made a difference. six years ago when i showed the film, the trailer itself created a tsunami of people saying this is a fabrication and this is completely fake. now six years later, the first step, and we say that actually in the film, of curing anything is actually admitting that you have a problem. and now egyptians, after six years, we started the conversation. six years. every egyptian knows we have a pandemic called sexual harassment. have we found a solution? no, but every egyptian now, if you talk to anyone, will acknowledge that we have a problem.

the power of the trailer is interesting. luckily enough we have got it so let's invite everybody to take a look. i mean it's interesting to reflect. you made that film what, five or six years ago, and yet today, if one looks at all the data from the un i mean it's interesting to reflect. you made that film what, five or six years ago, and yet today, if one looks at all the data from the un and from civic society groups inside egypt, egypt — of all the countries in the arab world — still has the highest levels of sexual violence against women. why? it is very complicated.

it is not only one thing. the way we look at women definitely, objectifying women, is one thing. i think the film focuses on the shame that is put on women if they report the case. so silence is the biggest contributor to this pandemic. has that changed in any way? even if the stats are still terrible, is there actually more space, if you like, for women to tell the truth about their experiences? yes, i can see that during, when we made the film, there was only one case of sexual harassment in the history of egypt reported. one case. so now we have hundreds, hundreds of thousands may be. women are now on social media, you can see how women and girls are talking about sexual harassment, completely different, and how their families and husbands and fiances are taking it differently. i remember some girls, women, telling me that she took her husband to the cinema to show them 678, to explain. she couldn't even bear to talk about it through the film.

so it is such a complicated film. it is not only one thing, and you have to see the film because the film for 90 minutes is trying to explain how are things. there is a main character who was following everything and he sees it from a male point of view, which is, it is a touch. it is like donald trump, exactly. it is a small torch. he doesn't think it is going to change someone's life. but it does, and you see that through the film. a lot of this conversation has been about change, and how you change people using art, notjust politics. you are not a politician, you are an artist. i hate politics. you hate politics? definitely. but let's reflect on politics. we talked about the activism you have engaged in, in january 2011 and beyond, the tahrir revolution.

we were all moved by what we saw on the tv screens, and yet here we are five and a half years later. there is a former general in power, the most extraordinary repression which is seeing thousands and thousands of people locked up for speaking out. do you actually believe that anything was achieved by that tahrir uprising? i think it is very wrong to look at a particular time and say the effect of things stop here. if we did the same thing with the french revolution, going after three years of the french revolution, we would have said it failed. would people now say it failed? no, but the civility was achieved after 75 years. they brought the dictator three times. three times they brought an emperor back. so we can just freeze a moment in time and say the effect today. the effect of today is bad but people are willing to change. we have a new generation that is aspiring for a new world, a new life, a better life of freedom of speech, democracy for everyone. until now, since five years we haven't been in power by the way. there is in single person who was really someone who believed

in democracy at heart who is in power in egypt yet. but do you admit you were wildly optimistic back in those days? 100%. you went up, i remember the picture, you went up to receive a webby award, one of the big global internet awards, on behalf of the egyptian people because of all the activism you had done on social media, and you said then, you said, injustice plus oppression plus social media equals revolution. well, you know, so much for that. i'm learning, i'm growing, and i was naive definitely. as i told you before, what we thought was just like democracy is going to be easy once the dictator is out, no, actually what we need to fight more than the dictator in the regime is ourselves. most oppression right now is not coming from the military regime, it's coming from the people who right now are actually

completely with what's going on. and a final thought. you talk about your own personal journey and no longer naive. the danger is that you become jaded, you become resigned and wary. one of the leaders of the april 6 protest movement said the other day when he was talking about whether there could be a new revolt, because someone on the web was talking about getting new mass protests going on in egypt. he said, "no, forget about it, egyptians are too tired and too divided to revolt today." do you think that is true? i think it is true but things are changing so fast and so rapidly. the past six months, egyptian currency lost 50% of its value. i don't think anything matters except economy. no one cares any more about human rights. no one cares any more about torture, no one cares about democracy. we care about one thing, egyptians, about one thing which is economy and economy is going to the worst place that we ever saw in our lives. and i can see from the people around me who used to support the regime that things are not

going so well. and by the way, from someone who believes in the revolution 100%, a revolution is a medical operation. there is a better way, and a way that we all wish that we don't go to a medical operation, which is pills, any kind of medication. so that's reform. so we wish and pray for reform before the next revolution is going to be a bloody revolution. everyone around me that i know is escaping the country, fearing that day. we have to end there. it is a bleak thought to end on, but, mohamed diab, i thank you very much for being on hardtalk. thank you very much. thanks to a ridge of high pressure, thursday turned out to be a glorious day for many. plenty of sunshine and a top of 17 in england. during the course of the night, central and eastern areas will hold on to the clear skies. friday morning, temperatures quite chilly. further south and west, increasing cloud, light and patchy rain, hillfog, and some mist as well. a bit more of a breeze here,

so a mild start in southern areas and further east. this area of low pressure will bring increasingly unsettled weather to western areas. friday morning, an east—west split. cloudy and breezy here across the west with drizzle. chilly and bright in the far east. a bright start in scotland and the northern isles. further west, cloudy with light rain. mist and murk in northern ireland and hill fog. also the case for north—west england and the south—west of england. the east of the pennines and east anglia, it will be a chilly start. at least bright with sunshine. notice the temperature difference. 6—7 degrees in the east, 10—11 in the west. the cloud in western areas will creep eastwards as the day goes on. not reaching the far south—east and east anglia really until after dark. here you should see

the sunshine. maybe a high of 13—14 degrees. in the west, mild but rather cloudy with some rain. the six nations rugby. wales against ireland in cardiff. the odd spit of rain in the air. the weekend, a tale of two halves. saturday looking dry into sunday. a weather front bringing cooler and fresher air mainly across northern and western areas. saturday, skies brightening up in northern ireland and scotland behind this weather front which will bring some dreary weather to central parts of the uk. the south—east, a little bit of brightness. bright indeed. 15, 16, 17. friday is a messier picture. we lose one weather front to be replaced another one. a drier interlude here and there. to sum up for the weekend, saturday will be the driest of the two days with some sunshine around and feeling warm across the south and east. sunday, more cloud around. many people are seeing

some rain at times. it will start to feel cooler and fresher. hello. i'm sharanjit leyl in singapore. the headlines: the politicalfate of south korea's president will be decided in a few hours, as the supreme court rules on her impeachment. more american boots on the ground in syria. 400 marines and rangers will support the assault on the islamic state group. i'm karin giannone in london. demanding answers — the parents of 31 teenage girls killed in a fire at a children's home in guatemala turn on the authorities. and the story of how prejudice against people with hiv is causing problems for a charity—run cafe in china.