The Hour of Liberation

The Hour of Liberation is the director’s cut of the film that was screened in 1972 under the title Guerillas of the Arabian Gulf in Rotterdam (see that film). After a political and artistic conflict with producers Jimmy Vaughan and Robert Erskine, the film-maker Heiny Srour won the right to put the material in her own form at her own cost. In Srour’s version of this documentary about the guerilla movement in Oman, she has tried to shift the more objective reporting of the producers’ version to a film that speaks the language of the guerillas. She also tried to return the TV-like cutting to that of a worthy cinema film. She succeeded in that, because the film was quite a cinema success – certainly for a propagandistic documentary.