Omar Robert Hamilton is a film maker, writer and cultural organizer working in documentary and fiction. He helped found Cairo’s Mosireen collective and works on the documentation, archiving and the visual record of the Egyptian revolution in various ways. He is also founder of the annual Palestine Festival of Literature, which seeks to challenge Israel’s various apartheid policies and the international discourse surrounding them. His latest fiction short, Though I Know the River is Dry from 2013, won the Prix UIP (Rotterdam), Best Short from the Arab World (Abu Dhabi) and Best Short Film (Yerevan). Hamilton writes-regularly for Egyptian journalism collective Mada Masr and occasionally for the London Review of Books blog. His debut novel The City Always Wins, about the parts of the revolution you cannot capture in the archive, will be published in 2017. In the following piece, he writes in the most heartfelt way about his hopes and frustrations during and after the Egyptian Revolution.