Unleash the revolutionary potential of filmmaking. Challenging the oft-rehearsed idea that protests of the Arab Spring were a product of social media, Viola Shafik turns our attention to the history of collective filmmaking in the Arab world and argues that cinema has always provided a means of organising and voicing a community’s grievances. Her thesis, illustrated in the form of a brief survey, finds contemporary examples in the work of filmmakers Mohamad El-Hadidi and Nadir Bouhmouch. The latter’s most recent documentary-experiment Amussu is the outcome of a participatory process initiated by those portrayed, enabling the inhabitants of a fiercely autonomous Moroccan village to speak of their decade-long protest against Africa’s biggest silver mine.