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We Are the Giant: Sundance Review The rather abstract and complex subject of the Arab Spring is given a human face -- or, more correctly, a handful of articulate talking heads -- in the slickly assembled We Are the Giant, from director Greg Barker (last year’s Emmy-winning documentary Manhunt).

The non-fiction film manages to both quickly place the Arab Spring in a wider socio-historical context of civil rights leaders and uprisings as well as zoom in on a few gripping individual stories in three places in the Middle East where the wave of protests by the people toppled leaders or ignited excessively violent state repression: Libya, Syria and Bahrain. A mixture of raw, first-hand footage, shot by protesters themselves, and more self-possessed interviewees ensures that the chaos and sometimes lethal risks of protesting come across as strongly as the pressing socio-political reasons behind them and the effects the events have had on the participants.

With a good part of the interviews in English and attractive (if perhaps a tad too poppy, seen the gravity of the subject) animated visuals as well as live-action footage, this should be on the radar of distributors and TV channels with an affinity for timely, mainstream-oriented documentaries.

The film focuses on stories from countries whose experiences of the Arab Spring couldn’t be more different, though some basic elements recur, including the non-violent origins of all protests and the importance of social media, with Barker integrating revolution-themed Tweets on-screen throughout. The film starts with what should technically be one of the major success stories of the Arab Spring: Libya, a country that managed, through a popular if quickly armed uprising (and U.S. and French military interventions), to remove its long-installed dictator, Muammar Gaddafi.

PHOTOS: Sundance 2014: Exclusive Portraits of Aaron Paul, Kristen Stewart, Keira Knightley, Zoe Saldana and More in Park City But the enforcement of the will of the people comes at a high price, as the story of Osama Ben-Sadik shows. The Libyan-American, who has homes in Virginia and Benghazi, lost his son, Muhannad,to the revolution at 21. “If everyone leaves, who will fight for the revolution,” Muhannad asked his father. Both inspiring and sobering, this most straightforward of the three stories suggests the human cost of the uprising as well as

how it was essentially driven by young people who, in turn, inspired others.

The film’s second part focuses on Syria, currently still stuck in a civil war. Activists Motaz Murad and Ghassan Yassin both stress that non-violent action is the only acceptable way to protest a government that uses senseless violence. But, like Nelson Mandela learned in his ANC days, there comes a point where the violence the state uses to squelch any peaceful anti-government protests comes at the cost of death and the remaining options become either letting the government win or taking up arms and defending the cause.

The longest and most complex segment is dedicated to two Bahraini sisters, Zaineb and Maryam, who are the daughter of human-rights activist Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, currently serving a life sentence for "terrorism." Some of the region’s biggest street protests occurred in Bahrain but human rights violations there -- including the arrest, torture and even killing of peaceful protestors -- have been virtually ignored by the West, mainly because of the country’s strategic importance (the U.S. fleet in the Persian Gulf uses Bahrain as its basis), the documentary suggests.

Zaineb is an Arab Spring Twitter superstar with almost 50,000 followers for her @AngryArabiya account and has participated in countless non-violent protests, repeatedly putting her life at risk and being locked up numerous times despite the fact she has (or as she explains, exactly because she has) a one-year-old daughter. Maryam escaped from Bahrain back to Denmark, where the sisters spent a part of their childhood after their father was exiled. From Copenhagen, she’s been tirelessly trying to drum up media and foreign government attention for what’s happening in her country in general and with her family in particular (her being in the film feels as much a credit to her PR skills as to Barker’s research).

Apart from the compelling and fluidly told stories of the struggle of individuals with a much more powerful entity, the state, what one takes away from We Are the Giant -- the title references a story Abdulhadi told his children in which the giant is the people and the government a small man who has somehow managed to convince the giant he’s in charge -- is that the Arab Spring means something different for each individual but that the uprisings are rooted in a general desire for change and fairness that would allow room for all voices to be heard. Barker here offers a courageous few as a starting point.

For the record: Co-producer Razan Ghalayini was responsible for the production of some of the footage in countries that Barker had no direct access to.

Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Documentary Premieres) Production companies: Motto Pictures, Passion Pictures Director: Greg Barker Producers: John Battsek, Julie Goldman, Greg Barker Co-producer: Razan Ghalayini Directors of photography: Muhammad Hamdy, Frank-Peter Lehmann Music: Philip Sheppard Editor: Joshua Altman Sales: Submarine Entertainment No rating, 92 minutes