When I speak to Sharp on the telephone from Boston a few days after a screening of the film at Harvard Law School, he sounds as humble as he appears on film. “I am bashful,” he says. “I am not used to all this personal attention.” He says the success of the film rests not on his hunched shoulders but on the bravery of ordinary people, who in the past 12 months alone have faced down dictators in Tunisia and Egypt. “People long thought that violence was the real power,” he says. “It took a number of historical successes to prove that was not true any more.”