Images of revolution "Images are like weapons. They can help topple a regime." Ali al-Bouazizi, political analyst. The uprisings that have shaken the Arab world were galvanised by photographs and v...
Ibrahim Hamdan
Ibrahim Hamdan is a documentary-maker for Al Jazeera. After directing his first documentary in 2003, he started with the Al Jazeera series Palestine Under Scope with a private company and he was a director and part of the production team for Al Jazeera series Israel from within with the same company. In 2005 he moved to the Al Jazeera Channel and in 2006 he was appointed as head of programming for the under construction Al Jazeera Documentary Channel. In 2007 he moved to the Al Jazeera Arabic Channel and was responsible for commissioning and production of the short features and a member of the documentary production committee.
In April 2011 he started working on the documentary Images of Revolution as a standard in-house production for Al Jazeera. The first broadcast was in July 2011 on Al Jazeera Arabic Channel, and then it was translated into English and broadcast on Al Jazeera English Channel in October 2011. The first international screening for the film was at the Festival on Wheels in December 2011 in Turkey. The second international screening will be at the International Journalism Festival in April 2012 in Italy. It will also be shown at the Al Jazeera International Documentary Festival in April 2012.
Ibrahim says this about the making of the documentary: “As the producer/director of the film I was requested to finish it within only ten weeks, the major challenge was to find out those persons among millions in Egypt and Tunisia. I spent around four weeks of the ten just searching for a couple of them. It was easy to find some of them as they were already known. At the same time, it was not easy to find some others. We spent days searching for them street by street, house by house, inch by inch using their clips, field contacts and even Google earth!. When I started working in the film I was thinking that those are something different than us but when I met them I discovered that they are very ordinary persons like any one of us but the difference they were in the proper place at the proper time turning their camera on.”