The Trials of Spring is a documentary that chronicles the story of the Egyptian “Arab Spring” as told by three feminist activists: Hend Nafea, a young woman from rural Egypt, Mariam Kirollos, a Cairo-based human rights defender and one of the founding members of Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment/Assault (OpAntiSH), and Khadiga Hennawi, also known as “Mama Khadija” or “The Mother of Tahrir,” a nickname that she was given by the youth in Tahrir in recognition of her leading role in the protests. This story of the revolution is based on two key resources: an assemblage of archival footage from 2011 to 2013, which are mainly pictures and news reports from Tahrir Square and other landmark sites of the Egyptian revolution, and testimonies, flashbacks and reenactment of personal events. Through a carefully constructed visual dialogue between these resources, the film depicts the struggle of Nafea, Krillios, and Hennawi as a representative story of feminism born on the brink of a revolution.

As the film attempts to highlight Egyptian women's growing activism against gendered violence, it focuses on how the revolution has mobilized a particular feminist movement that was fighting for the nation and against the state at the same time. Throughout the film, the three activists reflect on their efforts to fight sexual harassment, police brutality and torture, a patriarchal legal system in the service of an oppressive military state, and other forms of social negation and exclusion. The three narrators describe how the shifting grounds of the revolution failed the majority of its moving force: women.

The film weaves in two parallel narratives of the revolution: collective and personal. Both narratives are linear and portray the revolution as a singular event that has a beginning and an end. To depict the collective narrative, the film features extensive visual representation of Egyptian women during marches. Close-ups of the faces of veiled women from different ages and classes during protests also dominate the scenes. This narrative is sequenced by the testimonies of Nafea, Kirollos, and Hennawi, who at the beginning of the film emphasize the hopes and aspirations of women activists and all Egyptian activists during the early days of Tahrir, when women were “at least 50 percent of the revolution, maybe more” and when protesters truly believed the chant “the military and the people are one hand,” as Kirollos remarks. However, as the revolution “deteriorates” and peaceful marches are crushed by armed police and military forces that imprison civilians and undress and beat women, the collective narrative fades out as the camera centers on the story of Nafea as the protagonist of the film.

When Egyptian women returned to Tahrir Square on March 9, 2011 to march for their rights on International Women's Day, the camera documents the counter-revolutionary turn against feminists, focusing on the changing atmosphere in the street. Images of clashes between women protesters and a group of men who wanted women out of the square are mixed with news clips about virginity tests and the military intervention, Kirllios's report on the rise of sexual assault, and accounts of rape by women protestors, alongside photos of Mama Khadiga and Nafea drenched in blood after being hit by the military. This episode also devotes attention to Nafea's testimony about the molestation and sexual abuse that she suffered during her investigation by the military and police. It also foreshadows her emergence as a human rights activist who joins an organization called Nation without Torture, established by victims of torture. Interestingly enough, Nafea's struggle is depicted as a personal quest. She is filmed in her apartment in Cairo where she reenacts how she had previously staged a revolution at her family's house to protest forced imprisonment that was supposed to prevent her from returning to Tahrir. The reenactment is staged for the camera and serves to idealize Nafea's persona as a revolutionary heroine from rural Egypt who became a feminist because of and during the 25^th January revolution.

In the last part of the film, Nafea and Mama Khadija lose hope for the future of the revolution in Egypt. The camera follows them as they go to Rabaa Square in 2013 to witness the aftermath of the military's massacre of Muslim Brotherhood supporters. Nafea's growing anxiety about her future and the government's persecution of her activism is exposed in meetings that she holds with fellow male activists and her lawyer, who try to reassure her that the legal battle is not over. However, in the very last scene, she is seen celebrating the accomplishments of Egyptian feminists since the revolution at a festival called Art Square. She appears in the street holding a public information session about Nation without Torture and the fight against sexual harassment. Despite this happy end, the captions that follow reveal that in 2015 Nafea was sentenced in absentia to life in prison along with 229 co-defendants. We are also told that since then she had escaped and moved to the United States.

To what extent does Nafea's activism in exile go beyond the causes of the Egyptian revolution is not entirely clear. Nevertheless, several reviews of the film in European and American media outlets, as well as the director's bio on IMDb, describe her as an international human rights activist. This debatable label reflects the general orientation of the six-part series of The Trials of Spring: to turn narratives about Arab women who played important roles in their countries during the Arab Spring into personal epic stories of heroines. On the eve of the seven-year anniversary of the Egyptian revolution, one cannot help but think about the numerous local and foreign documentaries that had been made about the revolution both as homage and nostalgia to the eighteen days in Tahrir and the short-lived euphoria. The Trials of Spring belongs to this genre. What remains missing, however, are the untold stories of all the anonymous Egyptian feminists who mobilized before Tahrir and who continue to lead a quieter but ongoing revolution in Egypt today.