Egyptian documentary film-maker Mohamed Elkaliouby has delved into one of the most controversial yet illuminating incidents of modern Egyptian history – the workers strikes of Kafr al-Dewar in August 1952. The mobilization for better wages and conditions led to a clashes with police and an infamous trial during which two young men, Mostafa Khamis and Hasan AlBakary were sentenced to death.

The convictions cast a shadow over the nascent revolution at the same time as a representing a message from the Free Officers that they would not tolerate any dissent marring their plans for leading Egypt to full independence, progress, modernity and leadership. In My Name Is Mostafa Khamis, the 18-year-old’s younger brother and other family members recall the  events, relating their view that Khamis was not operating politically and played no direct role in the deaths of policeman or burning of a factory.

Historians and politicians of the Left also feature, including Salah Issa and veteran Tagammu party general-secretary Rifaat al-Said. Perhaps most arresting of all in this important historical record is the material relating to the republic’s first president Mohammed Naguib, his failed effort to save the two men and the remorse he apparently felt all his life for what happened to them. Elkaliouby plays a striking recording of Naguib just before he died in 1984 in which he screams in pain at mention of the Kafr al-Dewar events.

The executions were of significance for a number of reasons. They inaugurated the use of military courts for civilians that has never ceased since, and indeed which has come to be a defining feature of the military republic since 1952. The state’s insistence on the military trial was a central plank of the dystopian failure of Hosni Mubarak’s regime to regulate political life, and the Sisi junta has also insisted on its continuation in the post-coup constitution. The Free Officers quickly moved to effect land reform within days of the verdicts to maintain popular support.

Within the field of leftist politics, the rough handling of the strikes were a fatal blow to the moderate leftist group Hadito, which had faith in the military republic’s ability to deliver progress and justice, leaving the field to the more radical left. It also set the scene for the state’s destruction of the other various players in the Egyptian political arena, from the Wafd party to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Most intriguing was the suggestion that both the Brotherhood and the CIA, as well as Egyptian industrialists, were involved in the incident as agents provocateurs of sorts, settling scores or feathering their nests. Some of the revolutionary command council opposed the military court’s verdict, but among those that vehemently did not were Abdel-Moneim Amin, seen as a Brotherhood figure, and another cited as “America’s man” on the council.

Particularly with Rifaat al-Said, it’s hard to know how much we are being fed anti-Brotherhood propaganda. A notorious opponent of political Islam, Said isn’t above indulging in self-glorification, alleging that he managed to sneak political leaflets for Khamis’ release into a Free Officers’ meeting. That aside, Elkaliouby’s documentary is still a valuable document for rethinking the importance of a key event in the construction of the military republic that has Egypt in its grip to this day.