Noujaim's film equipment was confiscated at the airport, and she was briefly held at a checkpoint on her way into the city, but she retained a hand-held DSLR camera that she had purchased during a layover in London, having been correctly warned by friends that her other equipment would be taken.

She soon headed to meet Pierre Sioufi, a friend and well-off, self-described "salon revolutionary" who owned a top-floor apartment directly overlooking Tahrir Square.

Sioufi would become a nexus between foreign journalists and a predominantly English-speaking, secular group of Egyptian activists. The New York Times called him the "guru of the revolution" and his apartment the "Facebook flat."

Aida el-Kashef, a filmmaker and actress who frequently visited the apartment, introduced Noujaim to Khalid Abdalla, the British-born son of a dissident Egyptian expatriate family and an actor who had played prominent roles in "United 93" and "The Kite Runner." Abdalla had arrived in Cairo from London on Jan. 28, and he served as an eloquent interview subject for foreign media outlets during the uprising. He would become Noujaim's second main character.

Through the buoyant Hassan, Noujaim stumbled upon the film's third and final protagonist, an affable Brotherhood member named Magdy Ashour, who was encamped next to Hassan's tent in Tahrir.

Throughout the film, all three men, who came to befriend one another over the following years, open up their lives to Noujaim's cameras, even as Ashour begins to drift away from Hassan and Abdalla. Noujaim's sympathies lie more with her secular characters, and both Abdalla and Hassan receive more camera time, but Ashour is portrayed warmly and empathetically.

The film distinguishes between Ashour, who often disagrees with more conservative Brotherhood edicts, and the broader movement, which is portrayed through Hassan and Abdalla's eyes as cynical and manipulative. We learn of the complex religious and economic reasons that Ashour remains loyal; he was jailed and tortured under Mubarak, taken from his home in front of his children in the middle of the night, and it was the Brotherhood that supported his family.

But though Noujaim's protagonists come from diverse backgrounds, it is the ethos of Sioufi's flat — the innocent and self-righteous passion of young, mostly secular and often well-educated activists who saw themselves in a lonely battle with protest as their only weapon — that pervades "The Square." Their worldview goes unchallenged, even when those activists support a military coup to overthrow the Brotherhood, putting their friend Ashour in mortal danger.

Some of the same young Egyptians who protested alongside Noujaim's activists now criticize what they see as the film's rose-tinted bias and oversimplification of an ongoing revolutionary moment that is far from pure or straightforward.

Amira Mikhail, who volunteered with human rights groups after the uprising and now studies law at American University in Washington, D.C., said the film "fell prey" to the narrative of a select group of activists.

"'The Square' is really good at showing my story. I cried the whole film because of how real it was," she said. "My problem isn't really with who they focused on. It's the fact that they were able to make it through a fairly long documentary and they only chose to highlight the sexy story of the revolution."

Mikhail, a Christian, said the film did not do enough to highlight sectarian violence or the rapes and sexual assaults routinely perpetrated against women in the square after the uprising.

Nor did the movie give adequate weight to the unprecedented crackdown against the Brotherhood, she said.

"They absolutely disengage completely when it came to the actual attack on the Brotherhood," she said. "It shows their bias, the fact that they were able to target the military so successfully and show their crimes so successfully up until it wasn't to their advantage, and then they stopped."

Mikhail said she saw her friends reflected in characters like Hassan, and in the film's editorial choices, an extension of their flawed preoccupation with their own tight-knit world of protest.

"My goodness, the amount of time that we spent arguing with people, the amount of time that we spent almost masochistically hurting ourselves protesting when we knew there was no way out," she said. "And (the film) is exactly what Egypt is like these days ... We're not going to deal with it."

Noujaim disputed the notion that "The Square" had failed by not widening its lens to other troubling aspects of the uprising, or shifting its focus to the crackdown on the Brotherhood.

The filmmakers had to edit down from more than 1,500 hours of footage, she said, and the "news and the politics" of the revolution were best left to journalists.

The film's tight focus on activists like Hassan was born of necessity that Noujaim learned as a director: Involve more than a few main characters, she said, and audiences will struggle to make an emotional connection with any of them.

"What we hoped to do and what (cinema) verite film can do is try to give people a glimpse of what it felt like to actually be there in the square," she told Al Jazeera. "It's not really taking a side … You're trying to be as truthful as you can be to the experience and emotional journey of your characters. So if Ahmed is going through something, you're trying to represent that as best you can."

The camera crew spent many hours filming the main pro-Morsi protest, in Rabaa el-Adawiya Square, Noujaim said, and she hopes to make additional footage of that sit-in available online.

But ultimately, she said, her goal was to provide "a voice and a platform" to the activists: "Khalid also says this beautifully, that people often say that the struggle is between the military on one side and the Brotherhood on the other side, but really what the struggle should be is between these organized fascist movements on one side, the Brotherhood and the military, versus these disorganized social movements on the other side."