Documenting Syria: Film-making, Video Activism and Revolution 9781788316156, 9781788311731, 9781838604349, 9781788316170

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Documenting Syria

Documenting Syria Film-making, Video Activism and Revolution Joshka Wessels

I.B. TAURIS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA   BLOOMSBURY, I.B. TAURIS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc   First published in Great Britain 2019   Copyright © Joshka Wessels 2019   Joshka Wessels has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work.   For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page.   Cover design: Adriana Brioso Cover image © Omar Amiralay during filming of On a Day of Ordinary Violence, My Friend Michel Seurat…… on location in Beirut, 1996 © Abdel Kader Shourbaji   All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.   Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.   A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.   A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.   ISBN: HB: 978-1-7883-1173-1 PB: 978-1-8386-0434-9 eISBN: 978-1-7883-1616-3 ePDF: 978-1-7883-1617-0   Series: Library of Modern Middle East Studies   Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India   To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To Faisal, ‫كيلو ونصف‬ (d. 2017)

We must involve ourselves in the struggle for our common salvation. There are no clean hands, no innocents, no spectators, we must all plunge our hands into the mud of our soil, every spectator is a coward or a traitor. Every Day Life in a Syrian Village (1974) directed by Omar Amiralay (d. 2011) La Syrie a besoin du documentaire: il faut laver les yeux du spectateur syrien qui n’a vu durant 40 ans que des films de propagande.1 Hala al-Abdallah Yaqoub (2009)

Florence Ollivry, ‘La situation du documentaire en Syrie: rencontre avec Hala Alabdalla’, Babelmed (14 April 2009).

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Contents List of illustrations  Acknowledgements  Preface  Introduction  Dissident art and Arab cinema 

viii ix xi 1 9

Part 1  Documentary film-making in Syria 

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1 . Masters of Syrian documentary  2. Inspired by the masters, a new generation  3. Documentaries for social change, the case of Bassel Shehadeh 

23 143

Part 2  Eyewitnesses of a revolution 

167

4 . 5. 6. 7.

Syrian emergency cinema and YouTube  The view from below: Video activism from the North  Politics of the image: Relations with international media  To tell the world! Evidencing war crimes and virtual reality 

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173 193 211 231

Epilogue 

251

Filmography  A call from Syrian film-makers  Notes Bibliography  Index  Index of Films 

255 263 265 291 303 318

Illustrations Figures 1 Publication of the iconic picture of Alan Kurdi on 2 September 2015 and tweets mentioning migrants and refugees 1.1 Omar Amiralay, Nazih Shahbandar, Ossama Mohammed and Mohammed Malas in Damascus  1.2 Zikra and Ward on the set of Land for a Stranger in Aleppo  2.1 The young Ammar al-Beik with Nazih Shahbandar in 1994  2.2 One of Hazem’s paintings drawn during his first period in Berlin, 2014  3.1 Bassel during one of the Maseer Hikes in Syria  3.2 Bassel with friends during a hike  3.3 Bassel filming in Syria  4.1 Firas Fayyad receiving the prize for best Nordic Documentary in 2017  6.1 The new municipality in A’zaz in opposition area inside Syria  7.1 Participants in a workshop at Copenhagen in 2015 experiencing Project Syria with a VR headset  7.2 Monther Entaky and his colleagues from Aleppo Media Centre (AMC) operating a drone camera over Aleppo city in 2016 

15 45 77 108 120 148 149 157 191 214 239 240

Map 6.1 Active actors in the Syrian war, documented as of 22 May 2018 

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Acknowledgements This book is partly based on fieldwork carried out during postdoctoral research funded by the Danish Research Council within the framework of the study, The Role of New and Innovative Digital Media for Healing and Reconciliation in Postconflict Syria (2014–16), based at the Centre for Resolution of International Conflicts (CRIC) at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. There are many people I would like to thank who have been instrumental in this research and this book, from aiding and protecting me during my ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey and Syria in 2014, to commenting on earlier drafts and versions. First of all, I would like to thank Professor Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen and Professor Ole Waever for giving me the opportunity to spend two years as a postdoc at the University of Copenhagen, so I was able to interview and document the lives of Syrian video activists from Aleppo and Raqqa. Since the outbreak of the Syrian Revolution, I  had been communicating almost daily with my old friends back in Syria, where I lived between 1997 and 2002. Since the opening up of access to YouTube and Facebook inside Syria and the first upload of videos of demonstrations in 2011, I  was glued to my computer screen to watch, follow and check daily videos from Syria. My postdoc project on video activism fitted perfectly with what I  had already been doing since 2011. During my postdoctoral project, I conducted fieldwork in Gaziantep, Turkey and Aleppo countryside in 2014, interviewing Syrian video activists and documentary film-makers. It was during this time that the seed was planted to write a book. My time in Turkey in 2014 was intense and memorable, and I went from one emotional rollercoaster to another. In Gaziantep, I met old friends, made new friends and realized Syria would never be the same again. I would like to thank my old friends, Haj Abdeen, Mustafa, Mamoun and many others who have helped me, who protected me during my fieldwork in 2014. I would like to thank my friend Zeina, who hosted me in Gaziantep, shared her stories and withstood the surprises and fear of me being off again to unknown places, not at least crossing the border into Syria, at one point. Together with Zeina and others, I had collected clothes during 2012 in Lund, Sweden, to send off to Syrian refugee camps inside Syria. In 2013, we collected around 400 kilos of clothes and fluffy

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toys during a two-day outreach event in Lund, which I helped to organize for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) at Lund University. My further gratitude to Leif Stenberg, director of the CMES, himself a renowned Swedish Syria expert, for giving opportunities and support for Syria-related activities in Lund. During the major writing phase in 2016 and 2017, the CMES at that time was a haven of tranquility and scholarship. The list of people to thank is very long. I would like to thank my old friend Joude for being such a great friend; it was so good to see each other again in the course of the writing of this book. Then all thanks to other old friends who helped me with this book, such as the wonderful Lina, Qais, Roula and others I  know from my media training activities in Damascus; I  also thank Heddy Honigmann for inspiring me with undying love of documentaries. Furthermore, I would like to thank Cecile Boëx, Ali al-Atassi and everyone at Bidayyat, Syndi and Aziz Hallaj and Sana and Jihad Yazigi for inviting me into their home in Beirut. Many other people in Copenhagen, Oslo, Berlin, Beirut, Amsterdam, Stockholm and Malmö, contributed with conversations and constructive feedback on the idea of writing a book like this: Firas, Hamza, Ziad, Hanna, Sara, Sune, Donatella, Christa, Nabil, Christine, Ehad, Rebecca, Isabel, Miriyam, Enrico, Karim, Orwa, Ala’a, Amer, Samer, Avo, Yassin and many others: you know who you are. Last but not least, all thanks to my family who supported me all the way in writing this book, providing the space, time and a summer writing retreat in the Netherlands, which ultimately gave the push to be able to finalize this monograph. My deepest gratitude to all of you! Parts of Chapters  4 and 5 appeared as ‘Videooptagelser og den kollektive erindring’ (The role of video recordings in the collective memory of the Syrian Uprising) in Konflikten i Syrien:  årsager, konsekvenser og handlemuligheder, edited by Bjørn Møller and Søren Schmidt (Denmark:  Djøf Forlags, 2015)  as well as ‘Video Activists from Aleppo and Raqqa as “Modern-Day Kinoks”’ , Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 10 (2017), pp. 159–74. Part of Chapter 7 appeared as ‘YouTube and Evidencing Warcrimes; the Role of Digital Video for Transitional Justice in Syria’, Politik, 4/19 (2016), pp. 30–52.

Preface My love for both documentary film and Syria led me to write this book. I never expected Syria to become a big part of my life. I  had conducted long-term fieldwork for my master’s degree in visual anthropology in a refugee camp in Sudan in 1995 and my regional specialization was sub-Saharan Africa. But, since I spoke a bit of Arabic after my time in Sudan, I landed my first job as junior professional officer (JPO) in 1997 with the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) in Aleppo, Syria. I worked as an information and public awareness officer and, after my first two-year contract, I stayed on to conduct fieldwork and produce an ethnographic film about the rehabilitation of ancient water tunnels in Syria, which eventually ended up as the basis for my PhD dissertation in 2008. The first digital video camera with a 3CCD chip had been introduced on the European market in 1999, which had a massive influence on documentary filmmaking.1 So while on leave from Syria in the Netherlands in the winter of 1999, I bought a small Sony TRV900 that recorded high-quality digital video content suitable for broadcast. Since the camera was small and looked like a consumer handycam, I did not bother asking permission from the Syrian authorities when I started filming with it. Living in a small desert village called Shallalah Saghirah (Little Waterfall) during fieldwork, I filmed water tunnel rehabilitation work and the day-to-day village life, the weddings, the dinners together, the making of Arabic butter in the traditional way, milking and herding the sheep, the daily irrigation, taking care of the animals and the land. Everything that happened on a daily basis in this desert village, which at the time did not have electricity, and its only water supply was provided by a 1,500-year-old Byzantine antique water tunnel called ‘qanat’.2 Ultimately, I stayed in Syria until 2002 and wrote my PhD dissertation and produced its accompanying films on the basis of my long-term anthropological fieldwork. Being in Shallalah Saghirah brought respite from the busy urban life in Aleppo city, where I lived most of the year, it meant being away from the longreaching arm of the security services (mukhabarat) as well. Because I was one of the few foreigners living in the Old City of Aleppo, these not-so-obscure men were always watching me. ‘The walls have ears’, as Syrians used to say. In

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Shallalah Saghirah, I  was enjoying the silence of the desert, the smell of the farmland, the food, the fig trees in the irrigated garden and the warmth of its social life. But life in Shallalah Saghirah was not easy. I learned a lot about the many difficulties between families, having to make ends meet in a harsh and dry rural desert environment, the many setbacks when another crop fails, when the water is not enough to irrigate or when the sheep are dying. Despite the harshness, I fell in love with living in the desert, because of its positive social aspects, the family celebrations, the weddings, the birth of a child and the elation felt in the community with the discovery of water and the success of the qanat renovation in 2000, which gave the villagers more water. My film Little Waterfall (2003) was awarded with a special commendation in material culture and archaeology at the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) International Festival of Ethnographic Film in 2003. In that same year, a shorter version of twenty-six minutes was broadcast on BBC World, with a re-run by Al Jazeera English in 2006. Syria was only rarely covered in the news, so I was very happy with these commissions, which kick-started my career as independent documentary film-maker in the UK. Moreover, the villagers were able to watch the film themselves through the new satellite dishes in Aleppo and Raqqa. After I  left Syria, I  kept in touch with the villagers and visited Shallalah Saghirah for the last time in 2010, when I  was in Syria for a United Nations Development Program (UNDP) media consultancy job. In 2014, I reconnected with all of the family members I  knew from the village and learned about a massacre that took place less than a kilometer from their area in 2013, whereby in one day 208 men, women and children had been killed by militias liaised to the Assad regime. Bodies were burned or thrown in the water wells. By this writing, all of the people of Shallalah Saghirah are displaced and live scattered throughout Syria and in Turkey and Europe. The village is looted and empty and under the control of the Assad regime. Currently, I am in the process of another feature-length anthropological film about the events during the war and the new lives of the people of Shallalah Saghirah in exile. But the context in which my new film is produced is very different than eighteen years ago. Syria and its many refugees are now in the media limelight. Due to the Syrian Revolution, Syrian documentary films have arrived at the world stage of cinema. We are now living in a golden age of documentary film, with increasingly more attention to the numerous productions coming from the Arab World. The Gulf region has well-established Arab Film festivals in Doha, Dubai and Abu Dhabi and, in April 2018, the very first Arab-European Documentary Convention was organized in Leipzig, Germany, co-created by Dox Box and

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the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) with a focus on documentary industries of the Arab Region and Europe.3 Syrian feature documentary films firmly arrived on the international stage in 2014 and since then trailblazed the international film festivals, culminating with an Oscar nomination in 2018. This first Oscar nomination in Syrian history was for best feature documentary for Last Men in Aleppo by Firas Fayyad. Syrian cinema characterizes itself by the sheer innovation and experimentation from its beginning, with the pioneering cinema work of Nazih Shahbandar in 1948 to the Syrian video activists in Aleppo, who were the first ever to produce immersive 360-degree video content shot in a war zone and uploaded on YouTube in 2015. Syrian cinema started in 1908, when the first film ever screened in Syria was shown at a café in Aleppo. The first Syrian movie was The Innocent Suspect (Al Muttaham Al Baree), released in 1928. Since the first Lumière picture show in 1895 and the very first film in Syria, screened in Aleppo in 1908, the first movie theatre was inaugurated in Damascus in 1916. Syrian film production originated in the 1930s with the pioneering cinema work of Nazih Shahbandar, a trained electrician from Damascus.4 Similar to Iranian cinema, a strong symbolic Syrian cinematic language evolved in the 1970s. More importantly, Syrian film-makers were educated since the 1960s at highly respected film institutions such as Le Fémis in Paris or the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. Syrian film-makers started early on in their career to distinguish themselves in filmic language, experimentation and by the undisputed, superb quality of their films, which consequently have been awarded numerous prizes at international festivals such as Cannes and Venice. In A Silent Cinema (2001) by Meyar al-Roumi, telling the story of Syrian cinema, interviewees talk about a cinema that is silenced by the paradoxes of authoritarianism.5 Syrian film-makers, critics and historians of cinema will invariably say that there is no Syrian cinema, just a collection of Syrian filmmakers, producers, directors, actors and cinema films. Compared to the mass film production from Egypt, the best-known Arabic-language cinema country, Syrian cinema is indeed by far not as big as the Egyptian industry. But since the 1970s, the production of Syrian cinema has been a significant creative force and carved an important niche in Arabic-language cinema, defining the development of both Arabic fiction and documentary film. The uniqueness of Syrian cinema was characterized by a deep cinematic innovation early on in its inception in the 1970s, a distinct auteur orientation and surprisingly critical and political.6 I was surprised to learn that there was no book on the history of Syrian documentary film and video activism, in its entirety. With the current surge of

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Syrian-made documentaries on the world stage, a comprehensive resource book is long overdue, and I decided to write it. This book is a historic account of the work of all Syrian documentary filmmakers since the 1970s, an overview of documentary film-making during the first decade of the rule of Bashar al-Assad, coinciding with the defining moment of the emergence of digital video technology, and an exploration into Syrian documentary and digital video activism during the Syrian Revolution. The book covers roughly five decades of Syrian documentary film and digital video activism. Syrian documentary film has been political and dissident since the early 1970s and provided unique precedences opening the path to using the camera for documenting the Syrian Revolution, a popular uprising predicted by many Syrian film-makers, long before its start in 2011. The Syrian Revolution did not come out of the blue. This book aims to contribute knowledge to ongoing scholarly debates on the role of film, digital video and art during revolutions and dissent against authoritarianism, such as works by Roșca (2016), Snowdon (2014), AndénPapadopoulos (2013), Askanius (2012), Gugler (2011, 2015) and Cooke (2007), who, respectively, posed scholarly questions on the role of film, digital video, empathy and involved spectatorship in revolutions worldwide (Roșca, AndénPapadopoulos, Askanius); creative dissidence in the Middle East and North Africa region (Gugler, Snowdon) and oppositional arts in Syria (Cooke).7 On specifically Syrian film, TV and documentaries, further important research work has been done by scholars such as Salamandra (2005)8 on Syrian TV drama and soap series; Salti (2006)9 on film production and Syrian cinema industry; van de Peer (2017)10 on female Arab documentary film-makers; Bank (2017)11 on the (video) art scene prior to the Syrian Revolution; Dickinson (2016)12 and Khatib (2006)13 on Arab cinema and Syrian film culture and production in a wider historical, geopolitical and regional Arab context; Wedeen (1999)14 on political, symbolic and creative resistance against authoritarianism in Syria and Boëx (2011)15 on transformations in the Syrian cinema and TV cultural landscape and what she poignantly calls ‘emergency cinema’,16 about an emerging anonymous film collective, Abounaddara, which was established prior to the uprisings in 2011. A  new book (in press) by Della Ratta, who previously carried out her PhD research on Syrian soap series,17 addresses how digital networks shape contemporary warfare focusing on digital activism and ISIS propaganda videos from Syria.18 Surprisingly, all of these scholars on Syria media are women. I will elaborate more on their respective works in a short literature review later in this book.

Introduction

On a warm and sunny day in Aleppo in May 2010, I carried a heavy cinematic 35-mm camera through the small streets in the Old City of Aleppo. I had just asked my film-maker friend Ali from Damascus to send a professional camera assistant and equipment to Aleppo, so I  could assist Dutch documentary director Heddy Honigmann to shoot for one day in the bedroom of a fancy house of another Syrian friend. Heddy and I  had been in Syria for ten days, researching a story about Syrian lingerie. Although little-known outside the Middle East at the time, the Syrian lingerie industry was the most famous and prosperous throughout the Arab world. Years before, the Dutch Prince Claus Fund had supported a book and art exhibition documenting the extravagant designs of slightly raunchy Syrian lingerie sets, decorated with singing Tweetylike Disney figures, little fluorescent flashing lights, musical tones and, in some cases, with edible tops and thongs. Lebanese designer Rana Salam and writer Malu Halasa compiled the book, entitled The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie,1 a slightly orientalist work that exposed a side of Syrian society hitherto entirely unknown to Western audiences. Upon publication in English, an exhibition was organized in the Netherlands and unsurprisingly the book was banned inside Syria. But for a small interested niche-crowd of Dutch artists and film-makers, the book had ignited a fascination with that mysteriously intriguingly closed-off country called Syria. After learning about the book in 2010, Dutch documentary director Heddy Honigmann had approached me to conduct research for a documentary film that she was planning about Syrian lingerie. She had hired me because others had told her that I was the only Dutch anthropologist and film-maker specialized in Syria, I knew the country and its people well and, moreover, I spoke the language fluently. Upon being asked by her, I jumped at the occasion straightaway; who could refuse doing a two-week journey with one of the most internationally revered documentary film-makers from the Netherlands? This was a chance to

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take part in a priceless private masterclass! Immediately, we got on very well. For both of us, this fieldwork trip became an eye-opener. For Heddy, because it was her very first trip to Syria, and for me, because I learned a whole new side of Syrian society. The research journey with Heddy made me appreciate Syria and the Syrians even more, and I started looking at the country with totally different eyes while we immersed ourselves in these unknown worlds. My conversations with Heddy during that trip were educational, fun and personal. ‘I only make films about people I  love’, Heddy would explain to me. ‘I want to learn their stories, their journeys and how they arrived at the place in time and space where they are now.’ That trip confirmed for me my passion for the personal stories of Syrians, for the documentaries and visual storytelling. Little did I know that seven years later, I would be writing a book on the history of Syrian documentary film and digital video activism, in relation to the Syrian Revolution. But here it is, the result of love for a country and its people, combined with a passion for documentary film-making. This is a book about people I love. Two decades ago, many misconceptions existed, and still exist today, about Syria and the Syrians. I  lived in Aleppo between 1997 and 2002 and filmed my first feature anthropological documentary in Syria, about a small desert village where I  conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork. Since then, I have returned many times for various research, film and consultancy jobs and for personal reasons. Syria was unknown to many. Syria was a fringe country. Many of my Dutch friends would ask me if I, as a woman, was obliged to wear a hijab when I went there. ‘No’, I answered, ‘a sizeable part of the population is Christian, and the country is built on the idea of a secular socialist state, albeit an extremely repressive and militarized state, but not a country where they force women to wear hijab.’ Is Syria not just a big bowl of sand? ‘No, not everywhere is desert in Syria, the western part is green and towns like Kessab and Latakia have more rainfall than Paris.’ But, most importantly, there was not a lot of interest in Syria, except from some dedicated Arabists, Islamologists, archaeologists, the occasional anthropologist and political scientist, the culturally minded tourist and my parents, who enjoyed visiting the many beautiful monasteries of Syria, when I lived there with my family. Mainly, I wanted to write this book because of the many misconceptions about Syria and because of my admiration and respect for the bravery, courage and determination of so many of my Syrian friends and the film-makers that I have met throughout the last two decades. Each of their personal stories and work made, and continues to make, a deep impression on me. Despite the breadth and wealth of its history and several book chapters and articles written about

Introduction

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the subject, information about Syrian documentary is still scattered in various academic niches. Syrian documentary film has not been a primary theme or subject of any major academic or popular scientific book. Certainly, over the past few years, Syrian documentary film-makers have risen to prominence in the media and at the international film festival circuits. Syrian video activists have found their presence in the world news media, leading to the Syrian war being called the most ‘YouTubed conflict’ ever.2 But Syrian film-makers were active before the Syrian Revolution, before 2011, before Syria became fashionable in the media. This book aims to give an overview of the history and developments before 2011, highlighting the work of some well-known documentary filmmakers, as well as giving an insight into how this history relates to the digital video activism after the start of the Syrian Revolution in 2011. What happened during the Syrian Revolution cannot be seen independently from the developments before 2011. The Syrian uprisings did not happen in a void. The causes were rooted in a deep sense of resentment and fear of the dictatorial regime that stifled much of the creativity and freedom that Syrian documentary film-makers were searching for. Signs of the popular uprisings could already be seen for those who knew Syria well before 2011, during the Damascene Spring in 2000. It was seen in the production of the documentary films that were made and developed, and in the continued resistance of the masters of cinema to comply with the whims of the Assad regime. This book sheds light on those signs, within the context of cinematographic resistance. What are the linkages and synergies between the Syrian documentary landscape prior to 2011 and after the start of the Syrian popular uprising? Most documentary film-making prior to 2011 was done by film-makers based in Damascus, either employed by the National Film Organization (NFO) or independent young film-makers with external funding from abroad or through international organizations based in Damascus, for example, NGO and UN organizations that would hire film-makers to produce promotional films for development projects. The Syrian Revolution and civil war caused an explosion of film-making and digital video activism from all over the country; notably, young film-makers emerged from Homs, Hama, Aleppo and Raqqa. The conflict gave an unprecedented impetus to independent Syrian creative video content and cinematography. This book aims to make sense of the historical roots and artistic development of Syrian documentary and the landscape of revolutionary films and video activism that emerged after the start of the uprisings in 2011, by synthesizing the work and backgrounds of Syrian documentary film-makers, analysing their work and reflecting upon the influence that documentary films

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prior to 2011 had on the artistic and narrative development of young Syrian film-makers. The first part of this book discusses major figures in the history of Syrian documentary film. This part is divided into three chapters, wherein the first chapter describes the work, lives and artistic development of an older generation of film-makers, the so-called masters of Syrian documentary cinema. A Syrian film-maker who made a lasting impression on me personally was Omar Amiralay. His work on the Euphrates, but particularly his early film The Everyday Life in a Syrian Village (1974), resonated deeply with my own experiences and reminded me strongly of my own fieldwork and filming in the small village of Shallalah Saghirah. The film portrays many similar aspects and same situations of the everyday life of that village in 2000, a village that only received electricity from the government for the first time in 2004. Despite the time gap of twenty-six years since Amiralay’s film, people of Shallalah Saghirah struggled with similar issues of government malfunction, of an urban elite looking down on a rural peasantry, the deep-seated grudges of farmers with the authorities who failed to provide amenities, education, healthcare and support of the development of these small rural communities. This rural disenchantment with the authorities eventually became a major reason for the popular uprisings in 2011. Ironically, one can observe similar rural sentiments, criticizing the Ba’athist socialist revolution discussed in Amiralay’s film of 1974. Besides the work of Omar Amiralay, who exclusively made documentaries, I will reflect also on important Syrian film-makers and cinematographers from the older generation of cinema masters such as Ossama Mohammed, Mohammed Malas, Hala al-Abdallah Yaqoub, Nabil Maleh, Samir Zikra, Hala al-Mohammed and Mohammed Ali al-Atassi. The remaining two chapters of Part  1 discuss the arrival of a new kind of cinema with the introduction of small digital high-end video camera and a young Syrian generation of innovative and talented film-makers. Some of these film-makers were educated by members of the older generation through, for example, the Arab Institute of Film (AIF) and Screen Beirut, established by Omar Amiralay and his comrades. Hala al-Abdallah also played an important inspirational role for many young Syrian film-makers. The chapters reflect on the role played by the first documentary festival in Damascus, called Dox Box. The Dox Box Documentary Film Festival was established in 2007 by the Syrian film-maker couple Orwa Nyrabia and Diana al-Jeiroudi. This festival was an important platform for young and skilled Syrian film-makers to connect with the international documentary film industry that provided an alternative to the

Introduction

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state-controlled film industry. The third chapter of Part 1 of this book highlights the life and work of one of these young and particularly gifted film-makers, Bassel Shehadeh, who started making his name as an accomplished documentary director a year prior to 2011 and then played a vital role in documenting the very early phase of the Syrian Revolution. Bassel’s work and passion form a metaphorical bridge from the younger generation of film-makers to those video activists, who later became active in the Syrian Revolution. Part  2 of this book describes the rapid developments and the changing mediascape for Syrian documentary film. It describes the advent of digital video activism, the moment in 2011 when the Syrian government had made access to YouTube available and the start of the Syrian Revolution in the spring of 2011. Divided into four chapters, the second part charts the rippling effects of the moving images of revolution from Syria to the artistic development of a plethora of initiatives, the increasingly important role of digital video activism in documenting the Syrian Revolution to relations with the international media industry and the role of video in evidencing human rights abuses and war crimes. With the first video clips uploaded on YouTube in 2011, the Syrian documentary landscape started to change rapidly, with a velocity and volume unimaginable to many. The book explores the work of and relationship between an older and a younger generation of Syrian film-makers, exposing how these Syrians already resisted and criticized the authoritarian regime indirectly, without going on the streets, decades before the outbreak of the protests in 2011. I  cover the work and lives of many different Syrian film-makers and their impact and artistic development prior to and after the Syrian Revolution that started in 2011. However, this book does not pretend to mention and describe all the Syrian documentary film-makers that have ever been, and it may occur that some filmmakers are not mentioned or not elaborated upon. I have made a selection of film-makers who have been influential and either indirectly or directly resisted or criticized oppression and the rule of the Assad regime. Some of the young film-makers in this book I  knew from my time in Syria prior to 2011. Some of my personal friendships with Syrian film-makers date back to 1997, when I  lived and worked in Aleppo. Most of these young film-makers were based in Damascus. In 2014, when I  conducted my postdoctoral research on video activism from Aleppo and Raqqa for the University of Copenhagen, I connected with another generation of Syrian film-makers and video activists unknown to me, they did not have experience of documentary film before 2011 and were not based in Damascus, but in Aleppo and Raqqa.

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Documenting Syria: Film-making, Video Activism and Revolution

The central argument of this book is that the Syrian Revolution was the outcome of an accumulation of years of indirect and silent, but strong, civil resistance against the authoritarian Assad regime, expressed in a variety of arts, including cinematic documentary. Syrian documentary film-makers indirectly resisted oppression in their own manner decades before 2011. Early films from the 1970s and 1980s show this resistance that was a forerunner of the brief Damascene Spring of the year 2000, which had been a crucial political event motivating Syrian documentary film-makers to document the lives and horrific experiences of ex-prisoners who remained opposed to the Assad government. This resistance to authoritarianism prior to 2011 was expressed not only in the cinematographic experiments Syrian film-makers carried out but also in the social activities that a younger generation organized together to explore Syria and support Syrians in the rural countryside outside Damascus. In these activities, they were exploring the limits of the authoritarian regime. They were searching for personal freedom despite their ever-omnipresent fear of the regime. This created a networked group of young people, brave film-makers, who were ready to challenge the authoritarianism openly if the opportunity would arise. At the same time, when young urban artists and film-makers from Damascus gravitated towards each other by the end of the first decade of Bashar al-Assad’s government, the resentment in the rural areas of Syria, grew stronger during these first ten years. Those who were familiar with Syria and particularly following and observing the rural areas, knew that the fatigue of false promises, the resistance and resentment towards the Assad regime had been growing gradually and steadily. Again here, the Syrian Revolution did not start out of the blue. There is a strong rural dimension in the Syrian Revolution. The expressions of a deep-seated resentment by Syrians from the rural areas prior to 2011 are observed not only from my own experience carrying out fieldwork there since 1999 but also by watching the documentary films that were made since the 1970s by cinema masters such as Omar Amiralay and Nabil Maleh. In particular, Nabil Maleh’s Road to Damascus (2006) shows in detail the antagonism that was prevalent with Syrians living in rural areas. This film was initially commissioned by the Ministry of Culture but was banned because Maleh did not come back with positive stories from the countryside. Exacerbated by the impact of the severe droughts between 2007 and 2009 and the very poor government response to these climatic challenges, over 160,000 people from Hassakah in the north-east instantly became homeless and internally displaced, forced to settle in camps around Damascus. The government initially ignored these homeless people. Media and Syrians from Damascus were forbidden to

Introduction

7

go to the ad hoc camps, and it took very long for the regime to respond to this humanitarian crisis and seek assistance from the UN. Many seeds were sown for what eventually became the Syrian Revolution:  the frustration with the authoritarian state and repression, the animosity in the rural areas towards the Assad government, creative developments in documentary film-making, networking and friendships among young urban Syrian millennials who studied together and organized social activities such as hikes in the countryside and charity work for the internally displaced rural people from Hassakah. The argument of this book is that all these seeds, these elements, in the run-up to the Syrian Revolution can be observed in the documentary films made prior to the outbreak of the conflct.

Dissident art and Arab cinema

With the increasing number of independent Arab documentaries coming from Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria arriving at international festivals, it is an uplifting period for Arab-language documentaries. Syrian documentary has firmly found its place among major international documentary festivals such as Sundance, CPH:Dox and IDFA and, in 2018, made it to the Oscars. This book is therefore timely. It is the first comprehensive monograph about the history of Syrian documentary film and video activism. This book can be placed within a framework and history of scholarship on media and Arab Cinéma d’Auteur, activist film-making and digital video but also in relation to other forms and genres of dissident art. Earlier work within the field of dissident art and Arab cinema, and Syrian cinema in particular, has been pioneering and should be acknowledged. Especially, the extensive resource work by Viola Shafik, first published in 1997, entitled Arab Cinema, History and Cultural Identity, and recently updated in a 2016 edition in the wake of the Arab uprisings, is indispensable for scholars of film and cinema in the contemporary Middle East and North Africa.1 But also the influential work by Lina Khatib on the image politics of cinema, Hollywood and the Arab World and dynamics of activism has been instrumental.2 Arab cinema as cultural production is the window to representation of the modern Middle East as well as to its politics and power dimensions.3 In the following section, I  will give a brief overview of the scholarship on Syrian and Arab cinema and, in particular, documentary, the value of Syrian documentary to cinematic innovation in the Arab World and where to situate this book within that academic landscape. Rasha Salti (2006) and Miriam Cooke (2007) were the first two curators and scholars of film, media and art in the Middle East, who extensively analysed and described creative dissident opposition in Syria. Based on extensive fieldwork in the 1990s and elaborate ethnography of artists, Cooke (2007) describes the work of Syrian writers, visual artists and film-makers in her book Dissident

10

Documenting Syria: Film-making, Video Activism and Revolution

Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official, published by Duke University Press.4 Cooke’s instrumental resource of literature on Syrian artists leads the reader through an intriguing web of Damascus-based dissident artist networks who somehow are co-opted by the Assad regime in an attempt to provide a safety valve for the collective dissent not to boil over. Cooke (2007) calls it breathing (tanaffus) and likens Syria to a giant prison in which occasionally the art scene is let out on the ‘airing ground’ (sahat al-tanuffs). What Cooke describes in her book has become known as the ‘Syrian Paradox’ of Syrian opposition art, which political scientist Lisa Wedeen had described earlier as the ambiguities of domination in a society where people live ‘as if’.5 Khatib elaborates and writes about the performance of legitimacy and sloganeering by the Assads and Ba’ath Party implementing a ‘commissioned criticism’, as first coined by Cooke in 2007, as if the Syrian state is playing by the rules.6 Salti divides the situation into four paradoxes of Syrian cinema.7 The first paradox Salti analyses is that, despite a virtually non-existing Syrian cinema industry, due to the encompassing control of the state, there is a cogent and convincing body of work that functions as a collective memory of lived experience. The second paradox is that, despite having won critical acclaim and awards at film festivals worldwide, Syrian films were barely known inside the country because most of the films were eventually banned from screenings. The third paradox is that Syrian filmmakers have managed to carve a niche for subversive critique of the regime, while being fully state-sponsored, allowed within boundaries by some kind of feigned tolerance from the otherwise utterly dogmatic and repressive single-party state. The fourth paradox is that, despite censorship, Syrian cinema is made up of author film-makers who have produced cinematic gems of a high-quality cinéma d’auteur, rather than complying by turning out a body of propagandistic state-movies. The seminal work done by Salti, both curating Syrian cinema films and writing about it, starts with the first English-language book about film production in Syria, Insights into Syrian Cinema: Essays and Conversations with Contemporary Filmmakers, published by ArteEast in 2006.8 Based on a retrospective of Syrian cinema that toured around the world in 2006, which Salti curated, the book portrays Syria’s most critically acclaimed and internationally celebrated masters of cinema, such as Nabil Maleh, Samir Zikra, Omar Amiralay, Mohammed Malas, Abdellatif Abdelhamid and Ossama Mohammad. In their own words, they explain the many personal and professional challenges of making cinema films in the political context of a single-party autocracy such as the Assad regime.9 Syrian documentaries and the nature of their dissident authorship since the 1970s stand out within the regional context of Arab documentaries, which have



Dissident Art and Arab Cinema

11

continuously been struggling to shed themselves of state control, surveillance and marginalization. The emergence of satellite dishes, digital video technology and the arrival of Al Jazeera as international broadcaster in the late 1990s were three game changers in the media scape, followed by a growing number of Arab film festivals such as the Dubai International Film Festival throughout the Middle East and the Doha Film Institute, profoundly changing political identities in the Arab world.10 Also, increasingly more female film-makers were taking centre stage in Arab documentary, as indicated by Rebecca Hillauer’s and Stephanie van de Peer’s work.11 For Syria in particular, the establishment of the Dox Box Festival in Damascus in 2007 by producer couple Orwa Nyrabia and Diana al-Jeiroudi, who later relocated via Cairo to Berlin during the Syrian Revolution, contributed to the progress of Arab documentary production and distribution.12 With the establishment of the Bidayyat Foundation to support young Syrian film-makers trailblazing the international festivals since 2014, Syria has become a major Arab documentary country. Several encyclopedic works form important resources for anyone working on cinema from the Middle East and North Africa. Film scholar Gönül DönmezColin’s edited volume The Cinema of North Africa and The Middle East,13 published in 2007, provides a rich overview of Arab and Iranian cinema, where top scholars present their work, among others, Rasha Salti, Kay Dickinson and Roy Armes. Roy Armes’s encyclopedic Arab Filmmakers of the Middle East: A Dictionary14 and the new 2018 volume Roots of the New Arab Film15 are furthermore excellent literary resources on Arab cinema. Determined to bring more Middle Eastern voices to his American students, after the domination of Western perspectives in the media since the 9/11 attacks, Josef Gugler has compiled two important edited volumes on creative dissidence and film in the Middle East and North Africa region,16 dealing with, among others, Syrian cinema. In particular, his anthology Ten Arab Filmmakers17 gives an interesting insight into the work of Nabil Maleh, one of Syria’s most celebrated masters of cinema. The chapter in Gugler’s book about Nabil Maleh was written in the wake of the Syrian anti-regime uprisings by the eminent professor Christa Salamandra,18 who is the world’s leading authority on the Syrian TV drama industry. Salamandra has carried out long-term ethnographic research within the Syrian TV drama industry, since its exponential rise in the 1990s.19 Emerging out of a cinematic culture with a sense of dissidence, Syrian TV dramas have played a seminal part in creative industry development in Syria and the

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Documenting Syria: Film-making, Video Activism and Revolution

body of literature on this subject is substantial. As an activist-artist, Maleh was a product of this paradoxical cinematic culture of dissent. Where Syrian documentary cinema was part of a marginal niche and kept a slow pace, Syrian TV drama had a sizeable growing industry on a par with Egypt, because of its extreme popularity in the Arab World and with Arab diasporas worldwide. In particular, the Syrian soap series Bab al Hara, broadcast during Ramadan, was extremely popular throughout the Arab World. What is interesting in the work by Salamandra, is that Syrian soap series are surprisingly dissident. Similar to fiction and documentary cinema, the small Syrian TV drama production community functioned as an almost invisible indirect space of dissidence, an airing ground. Within the context of the 2011 uprising, Ghazzi (2013) analysed that both regime and opposition discourses echoed themes and symbols from the Bab al Hara series as a public space of anti-colonial critique against oppression that could be used both by the Assad regime and the opposition, to bolster their political positions.20 The full focus on the documentary genre in this book adds to the conversation about Syrian TV dramas, in the sense that while both genres grew out of a cinematic culture of indirect dissent and paradox, the Syrian documentary industry grew from a marginal indirectly critical industry in 2011 to an outright and openly direct dissident international industry in exile in 2018, while the Syrian TV drama industry shrank in size during the Syrian Revolution, it remained Damascus-based, is still largely co-opted by the Syrian regime and grappling with how to portray the Syrian war.21 As part of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, Syria was one of the last countries where protesters went out on the streets to call for change. In the wake of the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Libya, also the Syrians took to the mobile phones to record the street demonstrations. Much has been written on this phenomenon, and the legacy of documentaries from the Arab Spring is ever-growing with films such as ½ a Revolution by Omar Shargawi and Karim El Hakim, The Square by Jehane Noujaim about Egypt, Karama Has No Walls by Sara Ishaq about Yemen and No More Fear by Murad Ben Cheikh about Tunisia. This revolutionary era in the Arab World has put the work of young Arab activist documentary filmmakers on the world map. The number of feature films about the Syrian Revolution, and its subsequent civil war, has been more numerous than any other Arab country and, in that, Syrian documentary is unique within the so-called ‘Arab Spring documentaries’. More sadly, also Syrian documentary film after 2011, until today, recorded the bloodiest content, the most civilian casualties, the largest internal displacement,



Dissident Art and Arab Cinema

13

and the number of refugees of war were far higher than any other Arab country. The protraction of violence in Syria was worse because the government crackdown of dissent and street protests has been the most brutal of any authoritarian state in the Middle East. Roșca (2016) shows the defining moment in July 2012 when Google Trends display the shift in interest on searches on Syria going from ‘Syrian Revolution’ to ‘Syrian Civil War’ coinciding with the moment when China and Russia blocked any UN Security Council resolution against Syria.22 The entry of ISIS in late 2013 and intervention of foreign states such as Iran, the international coalition in 2014 and eventually Russia, Turkey and the United States with ground troops in 2015, consolidated this protraction of violence to which there still is no end in sight. Recent scholarly debates centre on questions about the role of film, digital visual media and art during revolution and dissent against authoritarianism, but also how activist film-makers aim to solicit a reaction from the audience to evoke empathy. Roșca (2016), for example, in her PhD thesis ‘Seeing with Feeling Filmed Revolutions of Others, from an Empathic towards an Involved Spectatorship of Documentaries’, applies a theory of filmic empathy to a study of revolutionary documentaries from twenty-eight countries in the age of the internet ranging from Guatemala to the Syrian Revolution, for which she was involved as instructor for the Hakawati project to train young Syrian video activists in Turkey. Grass-roots revolutionary documentaries aim to evoke empathy to motivate viewers, the audience, into action on behalf of the dissident film-maker and his or her ‘people’, for those they recorded on their camera. For example, when Syrian digital video activists, during the height of violence and sieges in Syria, recorded the countless barrel bombs, severed corpses, shouting and crying people searching for their loved ones in the rubble, they first and foremost wanted the outside world to ‘do something’ to stop this carnage. Roșca (2016) quotes film-maker Pamela Yates, who wants her film on the resistance in Guatemala, When the Mountains Tremble (1983), to organize Americans to stop US intervention in Latin America. Roșca (2016) calls this process modes of empathic arousal through the moral dilemma posed to the viewer. However, as Roșca finds out, Empathy is not an easy concept to grasp, and voices in film studies still wonder if such a thing even exists in the first place. Inquiries into what empathy really is, in film studies, were only recently approached, and are matters of ongoing disagreement, while the filmic means and mechanisms, charged with stimulating filmic empathy, go almost entirely unexplored. (Mădălina Roșca, 2016)23

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Documenting Syria: Film-making, Video Activism and Revolution

Indeed, much scholarly disagreement exists as to what empathy is and the role and effectiveness of visual media in resistance against oppression and wars and the visual sharing of the pain of others. It took Susan Sontag (2003) three decades of influential research on the effects of horrific vivid visuals of war and violence to conclude that, even though many think these war photos will make viewers realize the insanity of war and become anti-war activists, the memory of war is mostly local and shocking images are fleeting, they come and go, the suffering of others at a distance is only temporarily on the viewers’ radar.24 The selectivity of audience empathy is also observed in how images of suffering and violence coming from the Syrian war are received in the West. While YouTube has provided a platform since 2011 for Syrian media activists to upload their countless images of lifeless bodies of children killed in the Syrian war, it was only when the picture by Turkish photographer Nilüfer Demir of the body of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian ‘boy on the beach’, went viral in September 2015, that the plight of Syrian suffering stimulated a strong societal empathic response in the West. This was four years after the horrific video clip of the tortured body of thirteen-year-old Hamza al-Khatib went viral on YouTube among Syrians and ignited mass protests throughout the country. During these years, I  have written about the video of Hamza al-Khatib, the role of digital videos in the escalation of the Syrian conflict25 and how digital video content from Syria could form part of a corpus of testimonial and evidence of war crimes.26 While watching the many horrific videos from Syria over the past years, this one puzzling question has always been in the back of my mind since 2015. Why does a static photograph of the lifeless body of Alan Kurdi on a Turkish beach in 2015 have more impact on Western audiences than the horrific video of Hamza al-Khatib and the countless of other clips of dead Syrian children on YouTube that were already being uploaded since 2011? An extensive report analysing the ‘boy on the beach’-effect in social media using Google Trends was published by the Visual Social Media Lab at the University of Sheffield27 and concluded that the virality of the iconic picture (from zero to 20 million views in a span of twelve hours) instantly changed the vocabulary and the terms of the debate from migrants to refugees worldwide (see Figure 1). The impact was particularly observed in ten European countries, rousing politicians throughout Europe. In this report, Ray Drainville, poses the same question: Why particularly this photograph captured the imagination in Europe so much?28 Drainville explains that Alan almost looks like a sleeping angel and, because it is a photogenic and cleansed image of a ‘Christ-like death’, removed from any



Dissident Art and Arab Cinema

15

Figure 1  Publication of the iconic picture of Alan Kurdi on 2 September 2015 and tweets mentioning migrants and refugees. Source: Visual Social Media Lab, University of Sheffield, 2015.

context, important in a Western Judeo-Christian cultural context resonating with the visual habitus of the viewer.29 My explanation is threefold, and I believe it has to do with (1)  timing, (2)  projection and (3)  proximity. Starting with timing, the ‘boy on the beach’ photo emerged at a moment in time when the war and violence in Syria had escalated to such a height that Syrians, out of sheer desperation, arrived at the shores of Greece in large groups, gaining news headlines. Suddenly, they were on Europe’s doorstep! The suffering became physically close for Western audiences. Second, the photograph of the ‘boy on the beach’ is anonymous, allowing the viewer to stare, gaze and project their own situation on a body that could have been their child, their nephew; his shoes, his shirt, his tiny trousers, all look like the same clothes that Western audiences can identify with as their children’s clothes. The Sheffield report stressed the material agency of the clothes and showed that parents on Twitter drew on his ‘little shoes’ in their tweets, to make connections to their own experiences of being a parent.30 Had Alan been lying on his back, face forward, visibly Syrian, and wearing Arab or traditional Kurdish clothes, I argue that the image would not have had this impact. This is the selective empathy we are facing today in news media. Which brings me to proximity. Empathy has to do with emotional proximity: we cry for our direct loved ones who suffer, we cry less for those

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Documenting Syria: Film-making, Video Activism and Revolution

emotionally further away from us. By the Western viewers’ projection of their own children on Alan’s body, clothes and shoes, suddenly this Syrian boy became ‘their’ child and ignited moral outrage from Western publics. But for Alan’s Syrian aunt in Canada, Tina, who recently wrote an intimate and moving memoir about her family’s suffering, flight and nephew’s drowning,31 she did not need his photograph to understand the suffering and feel moral outrage. That is why I stress that empathy has to do with emotional proximity and not physical proximity, because despite Tina being physically far away in Canada, she had already been living the tragedy, for years. Scholars on video activism and the role of YouTube and User Generated Content (UGC) such as Snowdon (2014), Andén-Papadopoulos (2013) and Askanius (2012) argue that the power of the digital video camera lies in the collective ‘witnessing effect’, whereby the act of witnessing, of putting the body on the front line behind the camera, is the ultimate proof of witnessing humanrights violations. Kraidy (2013) goes further in the theory about the body as practice of dissent and resistance, as an example of one of the oldest tools of defiance. Before Web 2.0, before the internet, before social media, the body was the means of communication for revolutions. He argues that in situations of existential threat and scarce resources, the human body is the elemental medium of political defiance.32 The self-immolations of the Arab Spring in Tunisia (and Syria as well) are no different, but the hyper-mediation and speed of sharing information of such staged events on YouTube, social media and the internet is different with revolutions from the past. The focus as the camera as a weapon creates, however, a utopian and false promise of digital democratization pushed by a Western conviction that transparency and organization by citizen journalism will bring down authoritarian regimes, as Ghazzi (2014) indicates.33 After the Arab Spring turned into this protracted winter, we now know that citizen journalism on its own cannot and will not bring down dictatorships. Finally, to complete the current body of literature on Syrian documentary cinema specifically, several female scholars have been instrumental in defining the emerging field and are worth mentioning here. The work of Cecile Boëx shows how transformations in Syria’s cultural and artistic production prior to the uprisings in 2011 had been increasingly commodified. She investigated the consequences for TV and cinema production content with new cultural entrepreneurs and private companies emerging, expecting a loosening up of the regime’s influence and monopoly over art and the creative industries. But that assessment soon changed after the uprisings and in response what emerged was, what Boëx poignantly calls, ‘emergency cinema’, analysing an anonymous



Dissident Art and Arab Cinema

17

film collective, Abounaddara, that was established already in 2010 in Damascus. Boëx’s work proved to be extremely helpful as a key literature resource on dissident and experimental documentary film-making such as Abounaddara and became a powerful tool in Syrian dissident cinema.34 The important work by Kate Dickinson has been a crucial literary resource on Syrian film culture and production35 as well as in a wider historical, geopolitical and regional Arab context.36 During the last two years, the work by Stefanie van de Peer has been instrumental in scholarship on female Arab documentary film-makers. In her book Negotiating Dissidence, van de Peer writes an extensive chapter on the legacy and work of Syrian producer and ‘Grand Lady’ of Syrian documentary cinema Hala al-Abdallah Yaqoub.37 In her book, van de Peer charts the cinematic legacies of Arab women film-makers from Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco and Syria since the 1970s. Having investigated some of the emergence of experimental documentary and video art in Damascus in 200838 and the Syrian online video scene and its commitment to a new civil society after the uprisings,39 Charlotte Bank continued to finish her PhD dissertation in 2017 on the growing urban Damascus-based art scene during the first decade of the rule of Bashar al-Assad between 2000 and 2010.40 What is striking about the above-described body of literature is that the overwhelming majority of research is done by female scholars, who are, like myself, not Syrian. One could ask where is the Syrian scholarship on Syrian cinema, in particular, on documentary cinema? Apart from al-Ghazzi, who carried out his research from the UK, there is no Syrian scholar from inside Syria who extensively worked and researched Syrian documentary film. This has been impossible due to the fact that Syria is an authoritarian state. Most Syrian documentary films are banned in the country, and critical academic research on documentary film is not a field or subject in Syrian academia, under the rule of the Assad regime. However, worth mentioning is the brilliant, more popular, perhaps less academic, book by Halasa, Omareen and Mahfoud (2014), who edited a collection of papers in their volume Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline, providing a first overview of dissident media creativity during the Syrian Revolution and expending considerable effort to describe what Chad and Omareen call ‘Syria’s imperfect cinema’ and the emergence of video activism in the wake of the anti-regime protests of 2011.41 What is striking is that Syria Studies in general and academic scholarship on Syrian media and cinema, in particular, largely concentrates on the urban, rather elitist, areas of Damascus or Damascus countryside, prior to the uprisings. This is due to the fact that the Syrian cinema and arts industry focused foremostly

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Documenting Syria: Film-making, Video Activism and Revolution

on Damascus. Therefore, foreign scholars on Syria, if they carried out fieldwork, were mostly based in the main capital when carrying out their fieldwork and data collection. There are few scholars who ventured far outside of Damascus and its surroundings. In contrast, this book covers the entire country, also based on fieldwork periods conducted in the Syrian rural areas. In fact, the rural-urban divide plays an important part in some of the analyses given in this book. This book, within the context of what has been written previously about Syrian cinema, forms the first comprehensive resource volume documenting the legacy of Syrian documentary film. I hope it will become a point of reference for students, scholars, cultural entrepreneurs, film-makers, festival organizers and curators as well as commissioning editors, anyone who is interested in engaging with Syrian documentary cinema and its historical and contemporary role in Syrian society and collective action for popular resistance against authoritarianism in general.

Part One

Documentary film-making in Syria It was in the late summer of 1999; I was travelling to Damascus with my friend from Aleppo who had invited me to watch some feature films in the capital. ‘Not the sleazy ones of the cinemas near Hotel Baron in Aleppo’, he reassured me. The neighbourhood in and around the famous Hotel Baron, an old colonial building where Agatha Christie once resided and Lawrence of Arabia had stayed and signed his bill, was known for its sleaziness; Russian mafia had a bit of a foothold, and the local hotels offered Saudi tourists day-rooms with Russian ladies. It was dotted with sleazy-looking cinemas with suggestive posters. No, not the cinemas one would go as a blonde Western anthropologist living in Aleppo. These were the only cinemas I had seen in Aleppo, and in a conversation about cinemas my friend told me that the National Film Organization (NFO) produced several feature films per year but they were rarely shown. Curious about what films this nebulous NFO made, my friend was happy to introduce me to a friend of his in Damascus who had access to the films. One day, we travelled to Damascus from Aleppo to watch a collection of Syrian feature films. Together with a SyrianBritish student, who studied Syrian theatre and lived in Aleppo, we thought this was also a great opportunity for us to improve our Arabic. The three of us set off in my car. A six-hour ride south and we drove into the capital Damascus. My friend directed us to a place somewhere in the city where we could watch the films. I remember we were going down into a basement, which served as a screening room. There is not much I  remember from that day, but I  do remember it was just the three of us, sitting in this derelict kind of screening room where someone put on the 35-mm reels that would project us into a world unknown to many Syrians. The film stayed with me; it was the story of a man living in an apartment in Damascus. He was literally a prisoner in his own house. The film showed the feeling of restriction, of suffocation, of doing things in secrecy.

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Documenting Syria: Film-making, Video Activism and Revolution

Many symbolic shots in the film referred to being questioned by informers. Being chased. Haunted. Knocks on the door. Questionings. All events in the film were not so subtle references to what it is like being suffocated inside a dictatorship. Scenes were laced with symbolic shots of windows with bars in front of them. You could literally feel the fear of the protagonists. At one point I clearly remember the main female character of the film saying to her lover, the protagonist, that she feels as if they are thieves, two stupid thieves, not just inside but everywhere. Then after a while, there is a knock on the door, her lover pushes her away to hide her. He opens the front door. A strange man asks if he is so and so and if someone is in the house. The background music goes in crescendo, the tension is high. There is another man coming into the house and walks in. He finds the woman hiding in the kitchen. While her lover at the door is being questioned about his neighbour, he denies knowing him. They leave, and we hear the arrest of the neighbour. But then the door opens again. The neighbour comes through the door of the protagonist and begs him to help. He mentions his name. The protagonist denies even knowing his neighbour. The group of men pull his neighbour away and one of them gives the protagonist a slap in the face. Then the fear and confusion in the eyes of the protagonist are visible. The lady reacts as if nothing has happened and breaks down in tears as she walks out of the room. In the next shot, she walks out of the apartment building, which recorded with a zoomed-in lens, in a kind of voyeuristic manner as if she is being surveilled with binoculars. It is the last scene of the film. This particular scene left me shaken. I almost looked over my shoulder to see if anyone was watching me watching this film. It was so clearly a reference to the practices of oppression in the country that I became utterly confused about how this was a film supported by the NFO of Syria. I remember getting out of that screening room and into the warm and simmering Damascene street outside, and I  did not say a word. I  just walked past the parked cars, feeling in shock. Then I asked my friend if these films were screened inside Syria. ‘No’, he replied. But in fact, the film did have a brief fourmonth run in the 90s, as described by Salamandra.1 Puzzled about the whole experience, I continued walking along the pavement, grasping what I had just seen. Syria had developed this ingenious way to pretend as if the government allowed criticism towards the dictatorial regime? In fact, this was an utter illusion. I had just personally encountered the famous paradox of Syrian cinema, as described by Cooke2 and Salti.3 For years, I did not remember the name of the director of this film. I would find out only many years later, when I actually met



Documentary Film-making in Syria

21

him personally in Sweden and the dots connected. It was The Extras (1993) by Nabil Maleh, who is known as one of the giants of Syrian cinema. This book is not about Syrian fiction, it is about Syrian documentary filmmaking and its history. Almost all of the early documentary film-makers from Syria who received support from the NFO, also made fiction films. Many of them feigned criticism in their work, some stronger than others, toward oppression and dictatorship. Often these films were shot and then censored by the NFO inside Syria. When documentaries started to emerge from Syria in the 2000s, during the first decade of Bashar al Assad, with support outside of the NFO, the voice of cinematographic resistance became much stronger and came to fruition after the revolution. The last few years, Syrian documentary film-makers have been among the bravest and boldest in the history of the world’s documentary film-making. But their bravery was not born in a void. The fact of the matter is that Syria before 2011 already knew quite some brave film-makers, both in documentary and fiction film. In fact, the history of Syrian cinema is full of pioneers, both artistically and technically. The first feature-length silent movie, for example, was a documentary made in 1934, Under the Damascus Sky (1934) by Ismael Anzour, who studied film-making in Austria.4 The film is a unique and innovative work of cinema art. Influenced by surrealism, this spectacular film shows long pans of the sky, intersected by repeated shots of abstract forms, close-ups of symbolic repetitions, such as feet walking with aesthetics influenced by Arab traditional Islamic art. This first part of the book will give an overview of the developments of documentary film in Syria prior to the year 2011. Not many documentaries were made before the Syrian Revolution, but through research for this book, a sizeable and active group of Syrian film-makers has emerged. Identified are three categories of Syrian film-makers who have made non-fiction in Syria prior to 2011; first, the ‘masters’ of Syrian cinema, renowned directors and cinematographers such as Nabil Maleh, Omar Amiralay, Ossama Mohammed, Mohammed Malas, Abdellatif Abdelhamid, Hanna Ward, Samir Zikra, Ali al-Atassi and Hala al-Abdallah Yaqoub, who have built and produced important cinematographic legacies in the history and development of Syrian film and auteur cinema. The majority of these film-makers had their education in Moscow, and their films received support from the NFO. This older generation gravitated towards each other around the Damascus Cinema Club that was established in the 1970s by Malas and Amiralay.5 A second group is from a younger generation of professional film-makers who either studied abroad, for example, in France, or they were self-taught, and

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worked together with the older generation, sometimes in the context of the NFO and sometimes supported with foreign funding sources. However, in the wake of the digital age and developments in high-definition video film technology, it was easier to develop independent work as well, and some of these young filmmakers were supported by the Arab Institute of Film (AIF) that was established by Omar Amiralay and the renowned Iraqi film editor Kais al-Zubaidi, in 2005. The AIF organized training and workshops for young Middle Eastern documentary film-makers.6 The third group of Syrian documentary film-makers prior to 2011 is a loose network of young documentary film-makers and social activists connected, directly or indirectly, through the Dox Box Documentary Film festival in Damascus. Established in 2007 by film-maker-couple Orwa Nyrabia and Diana Jeiroudi, the Dox Box Festival was the most important contemporary documentary film-making platform in Syria prior to the Syrian Revolution. Experimental informal initiatives such as Abounaddara, founded in Damascus in 2010, originate from this generation, as well as the Al-Share3 initiative.7 These developments influenced a post-2011 wave of young documentary talents that led to a new push in the democratization of digital documentary film-making,8 further supported by cinema funds such as Bidayyat for Audiovisual Arts, a non-profit organization established by Mohammed Ali al-Atassi, one of the first generation of documentary film-makers. It also led to the grass-roots festival of the Syrian Mobile Phone Film Festival, established in 2014 as a form of civil resistance.9

1

Masters of Syrian documentary

This chapter gives an overview of the older generation of film-makers from Syria who shaped the history and development of the Syrian documentary cinema landscape. Since the country’s independence in 1946, Syria has been known as the Syrian Arab Republic (SAR) except between the years 1958 and 1961, when it formed a pan-Arab Union with Egypt. The country has been ruled by the socialist Ba’ath Party since 1963 and, in 1971, Hafez al-Assad took power and control of the government. The Ba’ath party also took control over the country’s radio and broadcast facilities, including cinema, through the NFO that was established in 1963 and gained control over all distribution in 1969, as an antidote against the domination of Indian, Egyptian and Hollywood films in the cinemas.1

Introduction In 1972, the first International Film Festival for Young Arab Cinema was organized in Damascus by the NFO, with the explicit goal to establish an alternative cinema in the Arab region, as coined during the festival.2 The festival and the call for the establishment of an alternative revolutionary cinema attracted other Arab filmmakers, for example, the Iraqi film-maker Kais al-Zubaidi, who had started to work in Syrian cinema production. Al-Zubaidi has continued to play a crucial role in the development of form, style and experimentation in Syrian cinema until today. Al-Zubaidi had been trained in Babelsberg, Europe and was known to be one of the most avant-garde film-makers in the field. In the late 1960s al-Zubaidi focused his experimental revolutionary shorts on the Palestinian liberation struggle. With the establishment of the Palestine Film Unit in 1968 in Amman, al-Zubaidi got involved in revolutionary cinema, searching for a novel cinematic form that rejected colonialism and resonated with the Palestinian liberation struggle. This group, of mainly Palestinian film-makers exiled in Jordan and fellow Arabs who

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stood in solidarity, aimed to contribute to the Palestinian resistance through film and tell the stories of Palestine and the Palestinians in a new kind of cinema.3 None of them were allowed back into Palestine, which had become occupied by Israel.4 These early shorts show an exceptional technical ability to convincingly merge avant-garde music and style with symbolic situations in an expressionist style. The first experimental shorts and documentaries that received support from the NFO were Far from the Homeland (1969), documentary about life in a Palestinian refugee camp near Damascus the recipient of the 1969 Silver Dove at the documentary film festival in Leipzig; The Visit (1970); Testimony of Palestinian Children in Wartime (1972); and With Soul, With Blood (1971). In particular The Visit is exemplary for the characteristic style of these kind of experimental films. The film is a poetic short about the imagined return of Palestinian exiles to their homes told through the scene of an exile passing an Israeli checkpoint by car, on his way to his family. The short is accompanied by texts from poems by Mahmoud Darwish, Tawfiq Ziaad and Samih al-Qassem. Later, al-Zubaidi directed the documentary film Homeland of Barbed Wire (1980), for which he sent a westGerman film team into the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967 and under Israeli administration. Al-Zubaidi was known as the best editor around and was instrumental when he founded the AIF with Omar Amiralay. He continued to be an important figure for many Syrian film-makers. Currently he lives in Berlin, which, after Paris, is the second European city where exiled Syrian film-makers have come together to advance their work. In the 1970s, Amman and Damascus were main centres of innovation and avant-garde cinema in the Arab World. Under the rule of Hafez al-Assad, and after the wars with Israel, the Palestinian struggle and occupation of Palestine continued to dominate the films produced in these years, also NFO-funded cinema, including documentaries.5 The other topics high on the agenda for the Ba’athist government were social injustice, the enlightenment revolution of Ba’athism and education and modern development of the rural backlands of Syria. These themes served as political legitimization of Ba’athist ideology and ultimately of the regime of Hafez al-Assad.6

The NFO for Cinema in Syria The NFO for Cinema in Syria was established in the same year the socialist Ba’ath Party in Syria took control of Syria in 1963. Based on socialist principles, the



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NFO’s mission was to educate Syrians in film-making, providing scholarships and support. The focus was on creating films to bring modernization to the country, Soviet style. Therefore, most of the older-generation Syrian documentary film-makers received scholarships and went to the Soviet Union to study film at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow. Some film-makers went to France for their study, like Omar Amiralay. In 1969, the NFO gained sole power over the distribution of films and started to fund films by film-makers such as Kais al-Zubaidi. Since the regime of Hafez al-Assad took power, the NFO had been the only organization through which Syrian film-makers could get funding. This changed by the end of the 1990s with the emergence of digital video technology and of Al Jazeera and foreign funders, after which young film-makers had access to cheap but high-quality camera equipment to shoot. Nevertheless, the NFO was and is the overall dominating state-run cinema production and distribution organization in Syria. Even though the productions were not outright propaganda, the NFO was an extension of Assad’s Ba’athist regime, keeping tabs on the cinema producers and the intellectual art scene of Damascus. At the same time, Syrian film-makers were given permission to make critical films such as The Extras (1993), shown at international festivals. All film-makers who returned from study abroad with support from the NFO received a monthly salary as a state employee. In 2006, this salary was $250 per month, the average wage of a state employee.7 This required the NFO to give them some freedom, otherwise the state employees would disappear very quickly, and the NFO needed staff. It gave the country the appearance that Syria had a provocative role in contesting dominant trends and modes of production; in 2012, Dickinson argued that this aspect of the NFO is worthy of consideration as an area for an effective fight for equality and freedom. For over forty years, the Syrian National Film Organization has been responsible for a number of stylish, provocative, politically-nuanced, yet state-sponsored films created according to a not-for-profit model. However, few of us have ever been afforded the opportunity of viewership. The National Film Organization’s contestation of dominant, exploitative narrative trends and modes of production, I shall argue, is all the more worthy of our consideration right now, even if, in many senses, Syrian state cinema can be construed as an organ of an abhorrent regime, and despite the fact that film culture may not, at first, appear a necessary priority within the fight for equality and freedom in the Arab world and beyond. (Kay Dickinson, 2012)8

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However, as transpired over the course of the Syrian Revolution, the NFO was not and never has been an avenue for political reform in the country. The relative freedom given to the film-makers was nothing more than a fig leaf. Lawrence Wright quotes Ibrahim Hamidi, Damascus bureau chief for Al-Hayat newspaper in 2006, who explains the double strategy of the regime to give film-makers the opportunity to test limits while surveilling the mood of Syria’s artistic scene: ‘The films get awards abroad, which is good P.R. for the regime. At the same time, Syrians aren’t allowed to see the movies . . . The people who rule Syria are not stupid. They play a very sophisticated game.’9

The Damascus Cinema Club (Damascus Ciné Club) A watershed moment in the history of Syrian cinema was the establishment and revival of the Damascus Cinema Club. The Cinema Club had been there in the past, when it was established in 1952 by a French language professor, Dr Haddad,10 at the University of Damascus as part of a Catholic cultural network whose headquarters were in France. Dr Haddad left for France and the NFO took over. When Omar Amiralay returned from his cinema study at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC) in Paris, and Mohammed Malas from Moscow, the two met in Damascus and co-founded and revived the Damascus Cinema Club in 1972, drawing people like Samir Zikra and Hala al-Abdallah Yaqoub and later also Ossama Mohammed, who returned from his studies in Moscow, a couple of years later than Malas.11 They were given access to al-Kindi cinema and established the Cinema Club well. While all his peers had studied in Moscow or other parts of the Soviet bloc countries, Amiralay had studied in Paris and was the only one who focused solely on documentary film-making. His own personal experience of filming the protests in Paris in 1968 made his first contact with cinema inherently political and set the tone for the rest of his interest in film and documentary, which eventually made him the most influential film-maker in the history of Syrian documentary.12 In 1973, however, the previously very supportive management of the NFO was replaced together with the power takeover by Hafez al-Assad. This posed some significant challenges for the Cinema Club. Resources were withdrawn, and the Cinema Club was expected to become entirely loyal to the state. The club lost the location at al-Kindi cinema and were warned to close down. Omar Amiralay recounts in his interview with Rasha Salti: ‘As we became estranged from the NFO, we also decided to take over the ciné-club, to protect its sovereignty. So we



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called for a general assembly to elect a new administrative team. The elections were actually fought fiercely, but we won. We took full control and the cinéclub fell under our control.’13 With the aid of the Damascene elite, the Cinema Club gained access to a place in the inner city, and Syrian veteran film-maker and pioneer Nazih Shahbandar, known as Syria’s first film-maker, helped them out by building a cinema set-up that could hold up to ninety seats. They had a newsletter, a set programme and organized workshops for the public on scriptwriting and shooting film.14 Syria became a worldwide pioneer of cinematic modernity with Amiralay, Malas and Mohammed as the golden trio at the cutting edge of these developments. The Cinema Club flourished with renowned film-makers Kais al-Zubaidi and Nabil Maleh joining in. With a film library, viewing theatre and office in Damascus, at its peak the revived Cinema Club had up to a thousand members.15 The club screened films from festivals in Europe and became a major public meeting space for intellectuals, artists and film-makers in Syria, as Amiralay remembers: Membership fees were purposefully low, we also programmed a weekly regular screening, every Tuesday, that date is till burned in my memory. We organized ‘film weeks’ as well. We received support from the cultural centers affiliated to embassies, they helped us with shipping film prints. By 1977, Nadi al-Sinama was becoming a forum for dissent, particularly as the more conventional venues for political expression were gradually shut down. The critical conversations started with the question of what kind of cinema we wanted to produce in Syria. At some point, while film screenings lasted for an hour and the half, discussions that followed lasted three to four hours. For a number of students attending our screenings, these discussions were their first or rarely afforded experience with an open and public political discussion. In retrospect, when we recall the days of Nadi al-Sinama, we bemuse on the number of political parties that were forged as a result of these discussions. (Rasha Salti, 2008)16

The Cine Club flourished and these were the heydays of Syrian cinema. There was an outreach programme involving travel to cities like Deir Ezzor, Hama, Aleppo and Safita, and the club received support from foreign institutes and film-makers to continue their initiative. Amiralay’s personal and professional network in France helped in receiving distinguished film-makers and critics in Damascus. Amiralay had been in Paris during the 1968 student uprisings and personally filmed that as well. He had invited the French film critic Serge Daney

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to Damascus, for a talk, screenings, actually an entire filmweek together with Cahiers du Cinéma. At the last moment, the Syrian government censored all films selected by Cahiers, including Jean-Luc Godard’s work. But Daney came to Damascus anyhow and they had a solution. He would recount the censored films frame by frame, in front of an audience, a moment Amiralay remembered vividly17: ‘Rarely have I witnessed moments of magic that rival this one. We were able to humiliate the government’s intimidation and clamp down, it was symbolically resonant at the time. Daney later recounted his experience in a long article in the Cahiers.’18 Through the constant harassment by the government, the Cinema Club did not last. In 1984, the Cinema Club had to close its doors, forced by the government when they had invited Syrian dissident Michel Kilo.19 The decades-long autocracy of the Soviet-controlled Ba’ath party stifled any major development of a cinema film production in Syria, let alone documentary production. The film-makers of Syria, and in particular documentary film-makers, felt they wanted to develop beyond the boundaries that the NFO was setting and were in a prison-like position and in some cases, they had been incarcerated. Hala al-Abdallah Yaqoub was imprisoned in her twenties due to her political activities. It was no surprise that Omar Amiralay, who exclusively focused on making documentaries, was the first to move abroad to France, where he would have much better opportunities as a documentary film-maker. Film-maker Hala al-Abdallah soon followed with her husband, the artist and painter Yousef Abdelke. Indeed, the Cinema Club had been important for political life in Damascus, and there were several attempts to revive it again, in particular during the Damascene Spring in the year 2000, but it was never as well attended as in its heyday in the 1970s. In 1996, the Cinema Club was re-established as a screening venue at the Sham Palace Hotel in Damascus, without any political salons or space for debates. Ossama Mohammed successfully managed to convene a board and executive committee meeting and al-Sham Cinema was rented for screening. I remember personally attending al-Sham Cinema to watch Youssef Chahine’s Al-Masir (‘Destiny’), which was advertised all over the country. But also the al-Sham Cinema became obsolete, as Amiralay explains: ‘Najah al-Attar, Minister of Culture at the time, prohibited us from holding our activities in foreign cultural centres. At some point we were instructed to screen Syrian films only, and that’s when we decided to halt our activities.’20 With the original Cinema Club dispersed, Omar Amiralay continued making films and became well known abroad as the icon of Syrian documentary filmmaking, inspiring generations of Arab and non-Arab film-makers worldwide.



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Below follows a description of individual Syrian film-makers from the older generation and highlights of some of their documentary film work. Based on literature, personal interviews and review of artistic work, I  have selected the examples on the basis of their influence and impact on the further developments of resistance and independent film-making in Syria before and after the Syrian Revolution. Some of the work made by the older-generation film-makers are not described in this chapter; the works made after 2011, dealing with the Syrian Revolution, I will discuss in later chapters.

Omar Amiralay (1944–2011) The most famous and renowned Syrian documentary film-maker is Omar Amiralay, who is regarded as the first and most influential Syrian documentary film-maker of our time.21 He was born in 1944, wartime Syria, in Damascus, to a Lebanese woman and an Ottoman military officer.22 He travelled to France in 1967 to study film at the IDHEC in Paris. A year later, Amiralay got caught up in the student revolts, which he filmed for his student film and this personal experience was formative in his decision to become a socially engaged activist documentary film-maker.23 It would be impossible here to discuss his entire oeuvre, which spans around twenty documentaries that he directed between 1970 and 2003. So in this section, I  have a made a selection of some of his films and their relationship with resistance film-making, rural revolution and collaboration with his peers at the time; Mohammed Malas, Hala al-Abdallah and Ossama Mohammed. Omar Amiralay was a prominent civil society activist. He is noted for the strong political criticism in his films and played a leading role in the events of the Damascus Spring of 2000. He is often referred to as one of the greatest Arab film-makers of our time, carrying the voices of opposition to injustice.24 He passed away in February 2011, just before the Syrian Revolution that he had predicted and waited for all his life. For Omar Amiralay, cinema was a way to discover himself, life, people and the reality that he lived in; he used cinema to explore the boundaries of what could be said and, in his art, often indirect but very powerful, critiqued and exposed social injustices he observed in his life. However, at the end of his life, he was convinced that cinema played a much lesser role than television in penetrating taboos and prohibitions in the Arab world.25 Amiralay had indeed

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worked in television but stayed true to cinema as his first love. Despite his genius for visual storytelling, Amiralay was not free to develop his talent to its full capacity in Syria. Between 1970 and 1980 he produced four documentary films, which were all banned in Syria. After the sarcastic and poignant film Chickens (1977) was also banned due to its strong critique on government policy and its detrimental effect on Syria’s peasantry, state repression became stronger and Amiralay himself was banned from making films for three years.26 He made a commissioned film on revolutionary Yemen, On Revolution (1978), and left Syria for France, frustrated and curtailed by the authoritarian regime of Hafez al-Assad, and he expressed this by describing the creative industry sector in Assad’s Syria as follows:  Everything that is being done in the fields of culture and the media, is aimed at controlling the minds of the Syrian people. People working in cinema feel paralysed and frustrated, because they can’t change anything. Our only opinion is to express our disapproval of the situation from time to time . . . cinema is a wreck. The official authorities consider it inferior, not only the cinema but culture in general. (Amiralay, 2011)27

Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam (1970) was the first NFO-sponsored short documentary film that Amiralay made. It is also the only film he made that was ever screened publicly in Syria.28 The film forms part of a trilogy on the Euphrates Dam. In this film, which served as a tribute to the Ba’ath Party’s grand modernizing irrigation project in Syria, Amiralay expresses his undying admiration for the Euphrates Dam Project, of which the now famous Tabqa Dam forms part. This film is a long praise song about the project and its promises to bring development and improvement to the nearby villages. Carefully composed grandiose images combined with rhythmic editing, this film is an expression as well of the avant-garde film scene that was emerging in the region. Its style was new, refreshing much like the Euphrates Dam. The film’s form was celebrated as a feat of modernity. The images of modernity, however, are contrasted with the images of the poverty and difficult lives of Syria’s peasants. The second NFO-sponsored film in Amiralay’s Euphrates trilogy is Everyday Life in a Syrian Village (1974), which is Amiralay’s first featurelength documentary of eighty minutes. He wrote the film together with Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannous (1941–1997). Iraqi film-maker Kais al-Zubaidi had now definitely joined the Syrian modernist film-maker scene and worked as editor on Amiralay’s second film. In contrast to the first film, Everyday Life in a Syrian Village is a rather unveiled and direct critique of



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the failures of Syria’s agricultural policies and revolutionary land reforms, maintaining social and economic inequities rather than solving or aiding the rural communities. Obviously, with the rise of power of the Assad regime and the difficulties he faced with the Cinema Club, this film served as an act of defiance towards the authorities. Despite having been sponsored by the NFO, the film was banned. The film went on to establish Amiralay’s name as a film-maker internationally and won the Berlin International Film Festival – Interfilm Award, Otto Dibelius Film Award and the Prix spécial du Jury  – Festival de Toulon in 1976. I would like to focus a little deeper on this film, because much of the themes and stories of discontent in the film can indirectly be traced forward to developments in the Syrian Revolution. It was also the first documentary film I watched from Syria that immediately resonated with my own experience living in the rural areas. The film explores the lives of inhabitants from the village of Al-Mwaylih. The building of the Euphrates Dam was supposed to bring development to these areas, however the Syrian government’s agricultural and land reforms and the state’s policies did not solve the problems of social and economic unequal relationships between landowners and peasants. Through interviews with farmers, educational health workers, a police officer and a government representative, contrasted with the demands of the peasant, the film shows that the government refuses to take responsibility for the negative impacts of the dam and fails to provide basic needs for the poor peasants, despite promises of an agricultural revolution and modernization. The film starts with an overview of the village. The wind is blowing and you hear the audio of the wheezing wind. The houses are emerging underneath a dust storm, Syrian soldiers are walking in the desert and there are close-ups of a dog. You almost feel the wind in your face when watching the first image in the introduction. Children are playing with a carcass. Gradually bird sounds are heard and the audio of the wind goes lower. The sound of these birds, I remember from my time in Shallalah Saghirah, where I lived in northern Syria. The family comes in with bread and the tray of tea. The audio is enhanced in postproduction to emphasize the slurping of the tea. The effect actually brings the viewer intimately close to this everyday scene of family life where the family sits together while the bread is dished out. Watching the scene, I feel back in Shallalah Saghirah. The enhanced audio effect works. Six minutes into the film, the scene is entirely set. A wide shot of the family walking into the desert brings more context. The only thing that separates the film from my own clear memories of Shallalah Saghirah is the fact that this film is in black-and-white, but other than that, it reminds me

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totally of the life in Shallalah Saghirah. People are wearing the same dress, eating the same food and taking the same transportation by donkey. Amiralay picks up these little human scenes that immediately bring a familiar feel to the film – for example, when the village school begins with a military-like appeal, we see shot of a disabled child. Then the scene cuts to daily farm work, a herd of seven donkeys being used to turn a mill. The recurring scene in the film is a compilation of the continuous rhythmic sound and images of the engine of a water pump. A familiar sight and sound of the Syrian countryside, accommodated with traditional Syrian music. The first interview in the film is with the head (mukhtar) of the village, Jassem, surrounded by his family members while sitting outside. He was born in 1952. His father was mukhtar of the village as well. He cannot read and write, and he does not have a radio. He does not remember when the war between Syria and the Arab world exactly took place. The interview is intersected with traditional Arab music and women making traditional bread, shaking sheepskin bags to make traditional butter. After the interview is a scene in the village school in which the teacher explains what can be produced from cows, sheep and chicken and teaches about personal hygiene, especially on Fridays because the village does not have baths. The school scene is followed by a scene of hard labour on the barren land. In parallel, the film audio is enhanced with the sound of the water pump. Men and women (around eight altogether) eat their bread and drink tea while the familiar water pump sound continues signifying the intrusion of the Euphrates Dam Project into people’s daily lives. In a car and riders scene, on the way to Deir Ezzor, peasants explain their health problems. All of the people in the car go to either a doctor or a dentist. The farmers in the car complain about the healthcare situation. They have no papers that are sufficient for the clinic. From the scene in the car we cut to an interview with a government official who explains the health situation in the rural areas. The interview with the health official does not include Omar’s questions. It is shaky footage, and the audio is recorded on camera. The official looks out over the camera and there are jump cuts. The frame is just a medium frame like a talking head. The official says that there is nutrition deficiency and a lack of health awareness. The official says that many of the visitors to the clinic believe in spells and make use of traditional doctors or untrue nurses. The car scene in the film reminded me immediately of a particular car trip in Shallalah Saghirah in 2000, when I drove a man with an attack of mumps to the nearest clinic. For its inhabitants it was always a hassle to find cars or minibuses or public transport to go to



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the clinic in Sfeereh, half-hour drive further north. The health complaints of the people from Shallalah Saghirah in 2000, were similar, albeit twenty-six years later. The health official also explained that if it were up to him, he would not do his service in the countryside. There is no money to go around. It was not much different in Shallalah. For example, the teachers of the school would rotate every three months. Some teachers avoided going to Shallalah. They would arrange to have a paper signed so they could avoid going out having to go and teach in the village. As a result, the countryside education remained neglected. The health official explains that most of the doctors are from the cities and do not feel stable in the countryside. They want to settle in the city. There is more comfort, and the transportation is better. The doctor explained he takes care of 20,000 to 30,000 people, yet he says that if he had the chance, he would leave the countryside. The interview is intersected by the women of the village grinding wheat in the traditional way with two grinding stones. One woman is asked how many children she has, to which she replies, ‘Seven girls and five boys, four didn’t make it, one got married, now I have three boys and four girls.’ The interview with the mother ends with a silent sequence whereby an aged peasant rids himself of his shirt in agony and frustration. This sequence returns several times in the film. Another recurring sequence is the scene with the pump engine, showing a close-up of the water pump with the familiar sound. The sequence is a compilation of the pumps, symbolic of the continuity of life, working, the countryside and modernization through technology. The men are preparing the land. It is handwork, it is a tough life. The next scene shows an official who says that the previous year they tried to open a class for eradicating rural illiteracy, especially in the village of Mwaylih. The Ministry of Education and a cultural centre of Deir Ezzor made many promises but nothing ever happened. In that year in 1972, they made calls to the Peasant Federation and the party promised to open a school in the village to fight literacy. But the cultural centre from Deir Ezzor gave a negative reply. ‘Everything was theoretical, not practical’, explains the official. One of the inhabitants of the village explains that there are many problems regarding rule schools and teachers. ‘First, there are no good school buildings to give a chance to students,’ the villager says. ‘Second, they don’t explain things well at the school.’ He complains that the director of the Ministry of Education should provide these kind of services. The third challenge is the quality of teachers and their commitment that lacks because of their urban background and bourgeois thinking. The peasant is specifically critical towards the governor

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of Deir Ezzor. He complains that the flood of 1969 requires compensation and this is not paid yet and they do not know where this money went. Again, the interview is intersected by close-ups of a pumping well. Cut to the music, women working on the land sowing the seeds by hand four in a row. An interview with the farmer tells the story of the shaykhs from the Rashid and Gadaan tribes. They would slaughter sheep and fight the Shammar tribe. When the French came, their power became stronger, because the French supported the Bedouin shaykhs. But the shaykhs left; their time is over. The farmer says the people thank God. The peasants got their freedom and all of their rights thanks to God and the State. Then we see an interview with a Bedouin tribe representative, who explains that after the Ba’ath party socialist transformation started the revolution of March 8, the situation changed. Through the land reform law (1958), the life of the people changed forever. It will go from a backward society to an advanced society. Revolutionary law was implemented for the lives of the peasants. The agricultural reform law had a major impact on the lives of the farmers. The representative juxtaposes it between the majority and the minority. The minority was ruling the majority. And it was opposed to education. They were also opposed to building of the road to the villages because this would bring villagers to the city. When these two groups meet, the city and the countryside, an idea might form in the minds of rural people to take revenge for the injustice they suffer from. This is not in the minority interest, so they worked against roads being built between the city and the countryside. They were also against the rural clinics and hospitals. The scene cuts to labour on the land again. Fetching water from a well and then the pumping of the water of the Euphrates. Cut to an interview with the local police man. He explains that it is better to solve problems among people amicably to prevent the occurrence of more conflicts. The two parties need to reconcile administratively. The policeman talks about the minor crimes that peasants commit. He says, ‘They’re not only a little backwards but also a little evil, so sometimes they hold up a stick just to threaten, nothing more.’ The contempt and condescendence that is expressed about peasants is quite striking. Then the film focuses on the actual conflict. A peasant worker explains he was beaten and attacked with daggers by seven brothers of the Daoud family of the landowners who wanted to confiscate a piece of land that is not theirs. He had to go to the hospital. Then the story arrives at one of the most beautiful scenes in the film; the dancing of a sufi zikr, spiritual dance. It gets to the heart



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of the village. The men start dancing their sufi dance and we see a shot of a window with women peering through to watch the ritual. This part of the film is pure ethnographic and extremely valuable material. Some of the men get into a trance and jump around like madmen, many of them are lying on the ground, exhausted. Suddenly the camera and the music stop, there is a zoom in on a man who is lying on the ground, there is no sound, he is shaking his hand on his head. From here, the film cuts to the recurring scene with the peasant undressing himself in distress, ripping off his shirt. In the following sequence, a representative of the cultural centre in Deir Ezzor, introduces the villagers to watching a film called The Syrian Arab Nation about modern progress that other countries have achieved. The representative explains that the film shows the true Syrian Arab movement, a true picture of its progress, which is of great interest to the Ministry of Culture because the film explains the idea of Arab nationalism and political thought. Then we see close-ups of people watching the film, which shows a Syrian beach with people playing in the sand on the seashore of Tartous, the urban areas of Syria. Amiralay enhanced the contrast by cutting to a sequence at the shore of the Euphrates where two peasants bring in sheep and a farmer’s union representative who explains how far reform has reached the village of Mwaylih. In the past, there was one big landowner who had around 1,000 dunums and the Hefl tribe used to own the entire village. Some people change the ownership because of the agricultural reform. Amiralay asks the union representative about the relationships between the tribes and the peasants. The union representative answers, ‘There is all this deception going on, to make the peasants happy, but if a peasant goes to the agricultural bank in Deir Ezzor, they obstruct his paperwork or his loan, sometimes delaying the paperwork for six days, so the peasant is forced to leave the loan to the farmer. The farmer is always in charge of the ledger . . . One person came here and he was told he wasn’t getting his land so he decided to take it by force from one of the landowners. I calmed him down, I was afraid there would be a massacre in town.’ Amiralay asks why there would be a massacre? The union representative says, ‘There are people in the village who don’t have awareness. There would be a massacre. And this would affect the union, affect everything.’ The union representative explains that the state has to get involved and remove the farmers off the peasants’ land to make it into state farms. Amiralay asks the union representative if he can read and write? His answer, ‘No, I don’t know reading or writing.’ The scene of the water pump returns, which Amiralay uses to structure his film. It gives a sense of progress, modernization and storytelling. In the next part of the film, Amiralay interviews peasants who complain about inequality,

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teachers in a classroom who explain that big landowners benefit from tribal mindsets, peasants who complain about the stronghold of tribal power in the village of Mwaylih while the peasants need more freedom and the tribal families need to cut down their power in the village. Then it transpires throughout the interviews that big landowners ejected peasants from their land by force. The peasants complained to the party and all of the state institutions but they did not react. Then for the first time, the film shows an interview with a female peasant on the land that she has been working for during six years for the Hefl tribe. She says the tribe sent someone one day to tell them, ‘leave, if you don’t want something bad to happen.’ They forced them to leave, they threw them all out with their families. One peasant tells Amiralay that he has nine kids and he has to feed them. ‘The tribal families are very rich and we have nothing’, he says, ‘where will we go?’, he says, ‘if I don’t get what’s rightfully mine, I will kill him and bid farewell to my kids, leave them to God’s mercy. I am forced every day to work for four lira. I can see my land with my own eyes and I’m forbidden to set foot on it. They’re good and calling for a revolution for the peasant and such, but we have seen nothing of it.’ The peasants complain there is still exploitation and no one cares about the peasants. The final sequence shows a scene of boys pulling the corpse of a camel. Then finally the peasant who pulls off his clothes has sound, and the frustrated man finally talks: ‘The tribal shaykhs are threatening us’, he says, ‘They want to kick us off the land and accuse us of crimes. The tribals are the real guilty party, they want to expel us and even frame us for murder. We have given up everything, our wheat and our homes. We have been in this place since the days of the Ottomans. We came from far to this place and now we have this party. Rockets are being sent to the moon. And he is kicking us off our land. If they kill one of us it’s no problem but if we kill one of them, we will be charged. We are hungry and dying!’ the aged man shouts desperately. The film ends with a still frame of the peasant pulling his shirt out of frustration. This second film by Omar Amiralay is an important document in the history of Syrian documentary film-making as first attempt to establish a school of filmmaking that is committed to social justice.29 For both Omar Amiralay and his co-writer Saadallah Wannous, this film was the beginning of a new start, and as Wannous explained in 1975, as quoted in al-Hajj’s article, it took a year to make this film between 1971 and 1972, based on thorough field research to assure clear and appropriate content.30 In a way, the film was a new start for Amiralay and laid the foundation for both Wannous’s and Amiralay’s further work. However, due



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to its critical discourse, the film was never screened for a Syrian audience. The strength and importance of this film lies in the Marxist critique towards a Syrian socialist revolution that had failed. Whereas Amiralay expressed hope and full admiration in his first film, the disappointment and indirect and ironic criticism in his second film is expressed through the composition of the interviews, the silent images of drought and despair and scenes that allow the viewers to judge the stories told, by themselves. The claims of the authorities are continuously undermined by the personal stories told by the peasants, who suffer from expulsion from their lands, frustrated and in despair. The recurring image of a peasant ripping his shirt off out of despair is in fact the most conspicuous expression of resistance in the film. This particular image is strikingly visionary, for it seems to predict a revolution to happen eventually motivated by decadeslong discontent in the rural areas of Syria. Of great importance in this film is the close collaboration between Saadallah Wannous and Omar Amiralay. The film was in fact the outcome of a much earlier idea that had formed in 1969 between the two men to document everyday reality in an eclectic panorama of lifeworlds, in many different settings of Syrian life, in a village, an urban neighbourhood, a factory, school, to discover lifeworlds they themselves were not familiar with.31 Their idea was to establish a political cinema of reality at a time when documentary film in the Arab world and Syria was practically non-existent. Both Amiralay and Wannous were political artists and visionaries and believed strongly that eventually a revolution against the dictatorship would happen. In Amiralay’s later film There Are So Many Things Still to Say (1997) made for Arte TV, Wannous expresses, shortly before his death, the hope and deep disappointments of his generation, the failed dream of pan-Arabism and disillusions with Ba’athist socialism. The film was a cooperation between Mohammed Malas and Omar Amiralay with assistant director Hala Abdallah Yaqoub. Based on a long interview with Wannous during his cancer treatment in Damascus, the film expresses the deep friendship between makers and Wannous and their shared worldviews and life’s reflections. Wannous, himself from an Alawite family, grew up in a small and poor village called Husayn al-Bahr, near Tartous, as he explains in the film, ‘We lived in a poor area, we had to think about food, health and education, as well as the cause which we considered most important; the loss of Palestine.’ His quote in the film is illustrated with archival footage from Everyday Life in a Syrian Village of people eating plain bread and drinking tea under a canvas tent guarding them from the strong desert winds and sun as if to illustrate that Wannous knew

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the struggles of the rural people through his own life’s experience growing up in a poor community. The injustice inflicted by Israel upon the Palestinian people formed much of the public views of the people of Husayn al-Bahr and Wannous’ own perspectives on life. He regarded the establishment of the State of Israel as a result of the guilt that European countries felt because of the massacres perpetrated on the Jews in Europe, and those who supported Israel were genuinely brainwashed into believing that the land had been empty and killing or removing Palestinians during the Nakba was justified as a revenge for what Nazis did to the Jews in Europe. Like Amiralay, Wannous felt that the defeat of Arab countries in 1967 was a pivotal moment in history; it was a deep disappointment and shook him to his core that the defeat was solely due to the weakness of Arab armies: ‘In the name of Israel, the Arab regimes ruled us; in the name of protecting a nation, based on their fighting capability, but they only piled up the defeats. It was a sharp and violent shock. It was as if our core dignity was assaulted.’ Amiralay emphasizes Wannous’s remark in the film with archive footage of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s official speech in 1967 where he announces his resignation out of the recognition of bearing the responsibility of the humiliating defeat: indeed a rare action by an Arab regime leader. A  visually brilliant aspect of There Are So Many Things Still to Say are the breaks between Wannous’s remarks with a close-up of a drop of the intravenous drip that Wannous is receiving for his cancer treatment. Looking closely, the last frame of each illustrative sequence is seen in the drop. Keen on bringing structure into his film, this is a typical visual detail of Amiralay’s symbolic cinematography, much like the returning water pump close-ups in Everyday Life in a Syrian Village. The returning image of the drop symbolizes the final phase of Wannous’s life, the reflection of images and memories, his deep disappointment with corruption in the Arab world, Arab regimes stifling any initiative of people, suppressing openness, the failure of Arab countries to bring justice for the Palestinians, who have been displaced from their lands since 1948 because of their backward political structures, the blows that Arab countries endured time and again, mixed into the tragedy of the mortal disease that Wannous is fighting. In fact, Wannous explains towards the end of the interview in the film that he suspects his cancer tumor is the direct result of the emotional pain he felt during the first Gulf War in 1991, when the United States started to indiscriminately bomb Iraq. In Wannous’s view, true peace and reconciliation between Israel and the Arab countries could only take place with radical and historical change on both sides, in Israel itself and a radical change in the Arab countries that are stuck in their way of thinking and governance.



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As a playwright, Wannous continued his indirect resistance using symbolism and dialectics of signifiers depicting authoritarianism of a minority suppressing and ruling a majority, longing for freedom, meanwhile preparing for an inevitable revolution with the expected terror response of the dictator.32 Wannous died, deeply frustrated and disappointed, on 15 May 1997, after a long battle with cancer. Resentment, disappointment and frustration characterized the emotions of the rural poor in Everyday Life in a Syrian Village; strikingly, these feelings of resentment could still be observed in rural Syria, thirty-seven years later. The repetitive sequence of the peasant ripping his shirt off out of frustration, expressed the same built-up frustration as a young Syrian man, Hassan Ali Akleh, from al-Hassakah, an area severely affected by droughts and poor agricultural government policies in the north-east of Syria, who set himself on fire on 26 January 2011, in an act of defiance and protest against the Assad regime and the decades-long neglect of the countryside.33 This was the very first start of the 2011 Syrian uprisings. Ironically, Ali Akleh was born in 1974, the same year Everyday Life in a Syrian Village came out. Wannous’s life and work were characterized by emotional turmoil and utter disappointment as well. His widow and daughter Dima continued preserving his literary and theatrical legacy. In 2017, a controversy arose when they decided to donate his entire library to the American University of Beirut, instead of Syrian official institutions in Damascus, but in defense of the action, they declared that none of the Syrian institutions had expressed interest in properly conserving the entire oeuvre by Wannous.34 The third film in the trilogy about the river Euphrates is perhaps Amiralay’s most famous and discussed film, A Flood in a Baath Country (2003), a masterpiece filmed six years after the death of Wannous. The poetry of the film is strikingly beautiful and again set in the northern parts of rural Syria, the village of Al Mashi, in the Manbij region. In this film, Amiralay shows, again without commentary, the stifling effects on Syrian society of forty years of monolithic Ba’ath Party rule. He lets the people and the images speak for themselves, and they become a concerto of self-incriminating indirect but damning critique of the failed policies. The film shows the indoctrination of the Assad’s Ba’ath Party told through the unassuming interviews with a teacher and a tribal government official and the reciting of party slogans by students of the school of Al Mashi. Of the three films in the Euphrates trilogy, A Flood in a Baath Country is the most powerful and most direct critique to Syria’s Ba’ath Party regime. Again, this film is characterized by a repetitive visual structure of symbolic wide-angle shots of the lake and the sound of the glorifying chants.

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Documenting Syria: Film-making, Video Activism and Revolution A Flood in a Baath Country (2003) unfolds in visual chapters, cycling through a dozen or more long, still, and wide-angle shots of the lakeshore, the sparse living quarters of Diab Al-Mashi, and various offices and classrooms in the local primary school. Repetition lends Amiralay’s Syria a sense of static and cyclical time, one that is mirrored by the omnipresence of framed, fading Hafiz al-Assad and the chants of ‘Vanguard!’ which waft periodically through missing doors and windows. (Chantal Berman, 2011)35

For the Attention of Madame the Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto (1990) is a seldom-discussed film directed by Omar Amiralay and filmed by Syrian cinematographer Hanna Ward. But the film is not less important in its value in documenting a sarcastic critique of the Assad regime, told through a relatively unknown part of Syrian political history. As with many other of Amiralay’s films after he left Syria, the film was made for French television. In this film, Amiralay travels to Pakistan to do an interview with Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Prime ministers seem to be among his favourite protagonists. In 2000, Amiralay made The Man with the Golden Soles (2000), a documentary together with Hala Abdallah Yaqoub, about the Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri. But where in the latter film Amiralay had unrivalled access to the politician, it was not so with Benazir Bhutto. The film is full of interviews with people close to the prime minister, her relatives and friends, but we do not see her. When Amiralay had just arrived in Pakistan, he and his cameraman Hanna Ward were informed that she could not see them. Consequently, her person is nearly absent from the film, except represented in the form of the telephone voice of a press spokesperson who answers Amiralay on the phone and holds him off with false promises and interviews with other people close to her instead: her uncle who explains the family history, her mother who tells him she never gave her problems, her close friend who is afraid for Benazir’s life. The repetitive sequence is filmed with a phone in the foreground, in the hotel room with the swimming pool in the background. Every time Amiralay is told by the press officer that he has another person for him. The interviews are focused on the just ideology of her father’s socialism and the popular fight against feudalism and colonialism that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto undertook; at the same time we get an impression of the Bhutto family as elitist, capitalist, almost colonial, enjoying lavish parties, living in grand houses and palaces. The film conveys the typical indirect critique that Amiralay employs through his films. The first part is filmed in Pakistan, beautifully shot atmospheric images of a colonial-style



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hotel. The interview with her mother is in the beautiful royal setting of a library. Amiralay spent time to situate his interviewees. The mother recounts the story of the death of her husband and how she encouraged Benzair Bhutto to become prime minister. She lost her husband and youngest son already, and her daughter has survived assassination attacks. ‘How many can they kill?’ she asks Amiralay. Her great uncle Mumtaz, whom Amiralay has interviewed before, complains about the course that Benazir is taking in contrast to her father, for example, the strong American influence she allows. He does not agree with her. Again, the press officer dodges Amiralay’s request for an interview. Followed by some amusing scenes of a Pakistani music brass band playing the ‘Que sera, sera’ and the returning tableau vivant with a phone conversation to try to arrange the interview, a closed hotel window in the background that opens to let the music of the brass band disturb the scene. The scene is followed by a two-second shot of the prime minister boarding her private airplane. Amiralay does not manage to speak to Bhutto. We hear the plane leaving while seeing Pakistani officers praying in front of a tomb. This is the tomb of General Zia-ulHaq, who executed Benazir’s father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. At this point, the film becomes intruiging and political, as Amiralay interviews the son of the general, who is proud of his father and explains that he was killed while inspecting the military. He explains that Benazir is obsessed with revenge. He describes how her government distributed disinformation about the tomb, that it had nothing in it, a day before the anniversary, to avoid masses of mourners. The general’s son ends the interview accusing the brother of Benazir Bhutto, Murtaza Bhutto, for giving the order to assassinate his father, ‘leading a terrorist organization from abroad.’ There were five attempts on the life of his father and all convicted belonged to the Zulfikar group. This group was in fact closely allied to the Assad family, as Hafez al-Assad had given exile and protection to Murtaza Bhutto. Eventually, the film turns to Syria and interviews Murtaza, living in exile in Syria. Amiralay has placed him next to a Mercedes car, in front of a typical traditional village with Syrian dome-shaped beehive houses. In the background, village life goes on, women fetching and doing laundry and walking into their houses. Murtaza is asked why he is in exile, and he explains that he led a group that fought a struggle against a military dictatorship and to restore democracy in his country. On being asked why he is still in Syria, while his sister is now prime minister, Murtaza recounts how he differs politically with his sister and mother about their leftist campaign against General Zia-ul-Haq and his current allies; ‘We had different perceptions, for example, the prime minister and my mother were convinced that democracy would be restored by peaceful means, maybe

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we thought otherwise, but it is the past now, let’s leave it . . . I  was convinced that when the army got into power, it waged war on the state. It assassinated the democratically elected prime minister [his father], whipped its citizens into obedience, and my brother and I felt that under these circumstances, we have to take measures which are not entirely peaceful. But at the same time I say, it is the past now, let us leave it.’ Benazir’s brother gives nothing short of a confession that indeed he and his brother were behind the killing of General Zia-ul-Haq. He is not inclined to go back to Pakistan soon, as he is settled since ten years in Syria, under the protection of the Assad regime. The film ends with an interview of one of the Islamist radical preachers in Lahore, who clearly states he is not condoning a female prime minister who is nothing but a girl of thirty-seven years old. It is against Islam. This is followed by an interview with Abida Hussein, who is a member of the political opposition against Bhutto and very hostile towards her; she crushes the bubble of portraying the prime minister as someone who symbolizes democracy: ‘I do not see how Benazir Bhutto can symbolize democracy because her father was the first marshal law administrator [Syria had martial law at the time] and the only one as far as I know, in the history of the modern state.’ She also explains how Benazir’s beautiful appearance is admired by the Western media and the Americans, which conceals her undemocratic nature. The film concludes with interviews critiquing Benazir’s women, rural development and poverty policies, which have not been effective at all. One man on a train complains that Benazir is very pro-American and is not working for the poor of the country, like he does. The film ends with interviews, in Urdu, with poor women who are utterly disappointed with Benazir Bhutto; they remained poor and nothing has changed for the better. They tell Amiralay that it is impossible to approach the prime minister, while they have given everything for her. Amiralay probably shared some of their frustration. Throughout the film he was unable to arrange an interview with the nebulous Benazir Bhutto. True to his structured approach, Amiralay made sure that interviews with women in the film were done by a male voice (his own) and interviews with men by a female voice. He uses repetitive symbolic sequences of menacing crows and a sequence of a small girl in a military tank rollercoaster going around, symbolizing the military style of Pakistani politics. Unwittingly, Amiralay became again a visionary with this film. Many layers in this work can relate to the Syrian Revolution and its development since 2011; the quasi-leftist struggle against a military dictatorship, the image of democracy while being protected



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by a military dictatorship, the gender narratives of the Assad regime, the fight against Salafi extremism and the Western media image of a nice beautiful and glamorous Benazir (cf. Asma’a al-Assad), representing the neoliberal autocracy of the Bhuttos. Why is this an important film to interpret the future Revolution in Syria? The film exposes a leftist narrative of a socialist revolution against a military dictator, and at the same time, this narrative in reality is neoliberalism and capitalism in an elitist context, symbolized by an elusive prime minister who seems out of reach for the common person, including Amiralay himself. The film also makes viewers understand the friendly relationship between the Assads and the Bhuttos. Purposefully, Amiralay contrasts the modernity and capitalism of Murtaza Bhutto against a rural surrounding; it is a brilliant indirect critique and undermining of the so-called leftist narrative through which the killing of the dictatoral general is justified. Interpreted and projected towards the Syrian Revolution-turned war, it also becomes clear after watching this film why Pakistan remained discreetly silent over Syrian protests in 2011 and the atrocities committed by Bashar al-Assad.36 Murtaza, who enjoyed the protection of the Assad regime for such a long time, was assassinated in Karachi in 1996. Besides his collaboration with playwright Saadallah Wannous, Amiralay also collaborated with his film-maker peers on several occasions. Syrian cinema in general, and documentary cinema in particular, is an outstanding example of the struggle of cinematic friendships.37 Amiralay is the only Syrian film-maker of his generation who exclusively made documentary films, but he was also involved in the production of fiction film through his deep friendships with fiction film directors Mohammed Malas and Ossama Mohammed.38 During the early days of the Damascus Cine Club and through their employment with the NFO after returning from their studies abroad, Syrian auteur film-makers de-facto became a kind of state-sponsored intelligentsia, as Dickinson describes.39 They had a certain freedom to create innovative, alternative, beautiful and critical cinema; however, when the film was eventually born, it was too often not distributed and lingered away in the dungeons of the NFO. In the positive scenario, the films could go on an international festival tour, but not shown to Syrian audiences. Syrian filmmakers sought each others’ comfort in their cinematic friendships. Upon return to Syria in the early 1990s, Amiralay collaborated once again with his filmmaker friends, based on the cinematographic friendships formed at the time of the Damascus Cinema Club.40 Light and Shadows, the Last of the Pioneers: Nazih Shahbandar (1994) is one of two documentaries (the other documentary is Moudarres (1996) about the

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Syrian artist Fateh al-Moudarres) that Omar Amiralay, Mohammed Malas and Ossama Mohammed made together as a team as an ode to cinema, based on a long interview with Shahbandar himself.41 This film portrays the history of Syrian cinema, its development and its political struggles and its demise, embodied in an old Syrian cinematographer who lives in his house in Damascus, between the antiques of Syrian film. Although the very first film in Syria was screened in Aleppo in 1908, and the first movie theatre was inaugurated in Damascus in 1916, Syrian film-maker Nazih Shahbandar is often regarded as Syria’s very first filmmaker who, trained as an electrician, pioneered cinema production in the 1930s and 1940s.42 He built his own studio with film equipment and sets, experimented with recordings and optic sound using his own machines, produced and directed the first Syrian film with sound.43 Shahbandar’s film was called Chiaroscuro/Nour wa Thilal/Light and Darkness (1947) his only film shot after Syria’s independence, a film that was unfortunately burnt.44 In the documentary we see Shahbandar wandering amongst his old cinema equipment, reminiscing and dreaming about film technology, with the enthusiasm of a twenty-year old. Finally, we also see the seven remaining minutes of his film, contained on a dusty tape. When Amiralay asks what he wants to do with his equipment, Shahbandar answers that he would like to wither away with it. At that moment, Shahbandar the person becomes the symbol of the state of Syrian cinema. In Figure 1.1 the three masters of Syrian cinema are seen together with the father of Syrian cinema, Nazih Shahbandar, during filming in Damascus in 1994. In her encounters with Mohammed Malas, Cooke describes how Malas talked about Nazih Shahbandar with a sad sense of nostalgia, full of respect and love, as if he was talking about his frail old and sad father, who hung on to his destroyed film, of which only seven minutes survived.45 Shahbandar was still living in the sets he built forty years ago, when Malas, Amiralay and Mohammed interviewed him.46 In the last scene Shahbandar gets into bed fully clothed and turns off the light. We are left with a black screen that represents the darkness of neglect that shrouds the memory of this great man. But also of the man who made this film. Although Shahbandar’s role in pioneering Arab cinema should have been considered reason for national pride, he has never been recognized. (Cooke, 2007)47

The other importance of Shahbandar, in particular, is that he personally supported the film-makers of the Damascus Cine Club after they fell out with the NFO in the seventies. Shahbandar helped Amiralay and his friends from



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Figure 1.1  Omar Amiralay, Nazih Shahbandar, Ossama Mohammed and Mohammed Malas (left to right) in Damascus © I. Amiralay.

the Cine Club with the building and design of a projector room. It is no wonder that Light and Shadows, the Last of the Pioneers:  Nazih Shahbandar (1994) was the opening film of the very first Dox Box Festival in 2008,48 which was exceptional as a public screening considering the fact that the film had not been available or distributed to Syrian audiences prior to that occasion. The film leaves the viewer with a sense of nostalgia but also with deep grief, for it is almost an obituary to Syrian cinema. The film was banned by the NFO, often called the graveyard of Syrian cinema and film-makers.49 Shahbandar’s final dream was to film and screen a 3D film and it was only years later in 2015 that something of Shahbandar’s dream became reality; in entirely different and unexpected circumstances, Syrian video activists from Aleppo released the first 360-degree footage ever from a warzone, called Welcome to Aleppo.50 A Plate of Sardines, or the First Time I  Heard of Israel (1997) was a close collaboration between Mohammed Malas and Omar Amiralay. The defeat of the Arab armies during the Six-Day War of 1967 and the subsequent occupation of the rest of Palestine had a deep impact on Arab consciousness and combined with a pan-Arab orientation of alternative cinema in Syria. The Palestinian question has dominated film-making in Syria since the 1970s.51 Mohammed Malas was

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born in Quneitra in 1945, a mixed Christian-Muslim city on the Golan Heights plains situated on the front line of the Six-Day War. Quneitra was the capital of the province of Quneitra and was captured by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967. The city was symbolic of the Syrian defeat, a symbol of hate between Israel and Syria.52 Retrieved by Syria in 1974, Quneitra became a central location for the Syrian regime as a commemorative open-air museum to wars with Israel. In a clear violation of the Geneva conventions, the Israeli Army destroyed the majority of buildings before it returned the city to Syria. The city was kept untouched exactly how it was left after the Israeli Army retreated. Divided by a demilitarized zone under the observation of the UNDOF (United Nations Disengagement Observer Force) mission, the Golan Heights now consisted of a western part under Israeli occupation and an eastern part under Syrian control. In Quneitra is the main crossing from Syria into the Israeli-occupied Golan, only used for brides, apples, students and religious pilgrims. In A Plate of Sardines, a short documentary of seventeen minutes, produced by Arte France, Amiralay tells the story about how he first heard of Israel. His aunt in Lebanon always had a plate of sardines with a penetrating smell in her house. When she and her husband were displaced from Jaffa, Palestine, her husband had to fish for sardines for a living, and its stench represented Israel for her.53 Then Amiralay turns to his friend Malas who is walking through the ruins of Quneitra, not really understanding what Amiralay wants. Malas feels sad and nostalgic, walking through the ruins of the city he was born in. He reflects upon his own films, how Quneitra, which is central to the struggle against Israel, has shaped his films, from the first to the last one. Malas asks himself whether his films are about struggle or about the Syrian cinema, which always dealt with the internal pains of the film-maker. He would love to see a film about the ArabIsraeli struggle filmed at the occupied Golan Heights. Quneitra was the location of many of his films, like Quneitra74, and Amiralay refers to the time they filmed together and the first time he entered Quneitra, which was left by the Israelis like an open wound, to show how barbaric they could be. What was the use of keeping this open wound alive? The destruction symbolizes the stagnant struggle and the despair. Malas tells his friend that he wished Amiralay had known Quneitra as a living city, rather than the dead ruins he came to know through cinema and his first visit. The irony of Quneitra in 1997 is of course that due to the Assad regime, the open wound is still there, untouched, having denied the original inhabitants of Quneitra any chance to rebuild and revive their city. The film ends with a sequence at the so-called ‘shouting fence’ north of the Quneitra province where inhabitants of the Syrian side and of the Israeli-occupied



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side, from the town of Majdal Shams, communicated with each other using megaphones. The camera moves to one shouting woman who asks her sister about her relatives on the other side. During the entire film it is clear how absurd the situation has become, where Palestine is embodied in a plate of sardines in Beirut, and the struggle against Israel is reduced to a megaphone that reaches the ears of separated family member on the other side of the ceasefire line. Unable to reconcile, Malas can never live in his beloved city of birth; it will never be the city of life anymore. Years later, a film student of Amiralay, the young Rami Farah, produced another documentary film about Quneitra; Silence (2006) follows two accounts of what happened during the retreat of the Syrian Army in Quneitra and concludes that the Syrian government utterly failed its citizens in 1967.54 Another important cinematic friendship was the relationship between Omar Amiralay and Hala al-Abdallah Yaqoub. Al-Abdallah had been a regular visitor at the Damascus Cine Club since the beginning and became involved in the Syrian film industry working together with Mohammed Malas and Ossama Mohammed, as well as Omar Amiralay. She eventually became Syria’s most noteworthy producer, collaborator and inspiring artistic consultant for many Syrian documentary film-makers.55 Connected to the Damascus Cine Club as a platform to exchange ideas and views, she was also politically active in the seventies and together with her fellow activists and film-makers had protested against Syrian entry into Lebanon in 1976.56 Consequently, Amiralay had also been vocal to call for the retreat of Syrian troops from Lebanon in support of the Lebanese Cedar Revolution after the assassination of Rafic Hariri in 2005. Five years before the retreat of Syrian troops from Lebanon in 2005, Amiralay had directed The Man with the Golden Soles together with Hala Abdallah Yaqoub and Syrian cinematographer Hanna Ward for French Television. The film is a portrait of Rafic Hariri, former prime minister of Lebanon, who was assassinated in 2005. This documentary drew controversy from the left at the time. It was problematic for a leftist documentary film-maker to make a portrait of the most capitalist prime minister in the Levant. It was thought, Amiralay would fall for Hariri’s charm and eventually end up making some kind of public relations movie for Hariri and his Beirut reconstruction business. Amiralay had anticipated this critique and included a table conversation in the film between him, Samir Kassir, Fawaz Traboulsi and Elias Khoury, where the latter rebukes Amiralay, telling him he is naïve to think he would be respected and answered by Hariri. During the filming, Hariri was forced out of office by the Pro-Syrian president Lahoud. Eventually, the film shows Rafic Hariri as a business tycoon who was able to tear down the past of Beirut to build a new city for the future.

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The film is nuanced as well as critical, laced with beautiful cinematography. The final sequence is taken from a PR-film for Hariri’s reconstruction project in downtown Beirut, the use of this archive footage reminds of the nuanced sarcasm that Amiralay is known for. It is clearly a contrast with the original documentary footage which portrays the ‘behind the scenes’. In February 2005, Hariri was assassinated, which radically changed the political dynamics of Lebanon and Syria. Samir Kassir, a prominent PalestinianSyrian left-wing activist journalist in Lebanon, who appears in The Man with the Golden Soles, had voiced his opposition to the Syrian regime always very strongly, which ultimately led to his death when he was assassinated in Beirut in June 2005. His book, published in 2004, Syria’s Democracy and Lebanon’s Independence: Searching for the Damascus Spring contains a preface written by Amiralay. He wrote, ‘We, the intellectuals, the educated, the artists, journalists and politicians, have remained deadly silent, passive and neutral. We feared taking any position or making a free and honest declaration about the crisis our people suffered through, especially during the cruellest period of tyranny and humiliation the Damascus regime inflicted on both populations in their own homelands.’57 The book describes the strong relationship between Syria and Lebanon and concludes that Lebanon cannot achieve true independence unless Syria becomes a democracy.58 Amiralay agreed with his friend Kassir. When he passed away on 5 February 2011, the Syrian Revolution that he had predicted all his life, finally started. After the brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protests by the Assad regime, Syrian activists began to better understand why the Lebanese rejected the Syrian occupation. Amiralay and many of his cinematic and intellectual friends had known all along. As the only Syrian film-maker who exclusively made documentaries, Amiralay is the undisputed icon of the Syrian documentary film. His life and work show the role his documentaries have played in resisting repression, providing a constant critique of authoritarianism, sarcastically exposing the emptiness and narcissism of elitist power holders and continuously calling for democracy in Syria. He was on the front lines of Syrian cinematographic dissidence. It is often forgotten that other Syrian film-makers of his generation besides fiction film, have done documentary as well. Both Mohammed Malas and Ossama Mohammed have made documentaries, despite the fact that their main focus was in fiction film. What follows in the next part of this chapter, is an overview of the variety of Syrian film-makers of Amiralay’s generation, who have made documentaries. I focus on a selection of their documentaries and occasionally



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drama-documentaries to show some of the breadth of this generation of Syrian masters of documentary film.

Ossama Mohammed Ossama Mohammed, part of the well-known cinema trio along with Omar Amiralay and Mohammed Malas, is one of the most important and influential Syrian film-makers in the history of Syrian cinema. Educated in Moscow, Mohammed was the youngest of the trio and famous for his experimental and brave cinema. Mohammed mainly focused his work on fiction film; however, his first film was a documentary. As part of his graduation from the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow, Mohammed filmed an experimental and daring documentary, Step by Step (1979), about the village of Rama at the Syrian Golan Heights. It was also the graduation debut of Hanna Ward, one of the most important Syrian cinematographers and directors of photography (DOPs) of the same generation. Step by Step was directed by Ossama Mohammed with Hanna Ward as DOP and is known as one of the best documentaries ever made in Syria. It is a short film, only twenty-two minutes long, but the strength of this film lies in its indirect but powerful critique towards authoritarianism on all levels. It shows the impact of autocratic rule in daily life, not only at the household level, where the film depicts scenes of domestic violence but also at the national level, when an army officer is prepared to turn against his own family members out of love for the homeland and its leader. Mohammed does not directly deliver a critique to the Assad regime, only through the protagonists and the way Mohammed asks his questions do we learn the depth of brainwashing that a military dictatorship achieves in ordinary young people, who have dreams about what they want to do in their lives. The work was filmed during the years 1976–7, but it was not finished until 1979. It is about the village of Rama between 1976 and 1977. The pre-title introduction of the film shows short interviews with children about what they want to be in the future. They choose to become a doctor, a teacher and an engineer. A song by villagers praising Hafez al-Assad introduces the film story; the people sing that he will protect the villagers. This sequence is followed by scenes of everyday life of a family and the children doing their homework, then a scene of the next morning in the classroom and the children singing a song, in praise of the homeland and its leader.

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We are drawn deeper into the family life when we see the members eating breakfast, intersected with close-ups of some farm animals. This opening scene reminded me strongly of the scenes I shot twenty-four years later in Shallalah Saghirah in 2000, where I spent hours with the protagonists, filming breakfast and daily routine. Mohammed then interviews a farmer about the plots of land with tobacco plants. The farmer explains how they work from February to June, at least ten hours per day for planting. Small scenes intersect the interviews with family members fetching water, bathing kids, ploughing the fields. The kids are running over the land. Then we see shots of kids sleeping. It is raining outside. A little boy runs outside and sees an airplane. They are running to school, while we hear the sound of a flight from Damascus to New York, in the background. With this scene, Mohammed contrasts the rural life in the village with the high life on the plane. Then the viewer is introduced to the village classroom and we see close-ups of children waiting for something to happen. We see a close-up of the teacher, looking at a child. Then a little girl gets a slap in the face, enhanced by audio, which we hear clearly. The camera follows the children coming out of the school and Mohammed focuses on the little girl who was hit. She sits next to the road and cries. The scene is followed by an interview with one of the village elders. He says people come in different degrees and only God has true knowledge, intersected by various different close-ups of pupils getting hit by the teacher and of onlooking farm animals. A father who is angry with his son says he cannot respect him if he does not study. The son is told that he should either study or work on the farm, but the father makes it clear that if he turns his back, there is nothing between them as father and son. His father tells him that he does not want to see his face and that he should ‘get the hell out of here.’ A young soldier in a following interview explains that he literally got sick from the school in the village because they treated him and his fellow students so cruelly. With his family, he found it really hard because his father forced him to go to school or work on their land. The young soldier decided to work on the land, in the tobacco and the olive fields. But after a while, it would not get him anything in return. That is why he joined the Syrian navy. The interview is followed by the camera joining a young man in the bus that drives him through Syria through the coastal towns. In this part of the film, we get an insight into construction work life in a coastal town in Syria. The next sequence is perhaps the darkest and most harrowing scene of the film. Mohammed asks a young man, who joined the navy, if he would turn to his parents if they were politically against the state, and the young man replies positively. He would follow military orders first, he says: ‘Yes, I can’t refuse then



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they either submit to the state or they’re all going to die. If you say something that hurts the security of the state I’d kill him, I really would.’ At this point in the film, Mohammed shows the deeply seated brainwashing that is going on in the Syrian military. The soldiers would even turn against their own family and loved ones for the protection of the state. The film ends with shots of the kids alongside the road. In the credits, the crew thanks the villagers of Rama and hope they have a better future. Step by Step hauntingly depicts images of everyday life in rural Syria in the 1970s and shows that the only way out of poverty for these young men is to either become a seasonal migrant labourer in provincial towns and cities or join the army. Once having been in the army, the Ba’ath regime frightingly turns these young men into monsters who are even prepared to kill their own parents. Harrowingly, this film brings the viewer to the core of what it means to grow up as a young man or woman in a poor rural area, in a country governed by an authoritarian dictatorship. But more harrowingly, the film shows the deep seatedness of violence at all levels in Syrian society. This experimental first film set the tone for Mohammed to become a central figure in Syrian cinema, unconventional and poetic in his art, through symbolism and indirectly providing a devastating analysis and insight into the workings of authoritarianism. His auteur-style film-making reflected into the fiction films he made, whereby he often used symbolic metaphors to deliver satirical and deeply critical political commentary to anything in dictatorial Syria, from the Assadist personality cult to the dominance of patriarchal families and fear and repression that infiltrated all levels of Syrian society.59 Understanding the ambiguities of a dictatorship is quite difficult for those who grew up in free and democratic societies, but Step by Step gives those who never experienced what it is like to grow up in a society permeated with fear an insight into the workings and influence on daily lives. Lisa Wedeen describes, in her groundbreaking book on Hafez al-Assad’s authoritarianism and its domination, how rhetoric and symbols are central to politics, dissecting the working of Hafez al-Assad’s personality cult, the inundation of daily life with symbolic ideology to enforce obedience and complicity, ultimately isolating Syrians from each other and even tearing apart their families.60 The film Step by Step inspired many subsequent generations of Syrian film-makers. Mohammed has won many festival awards with his films and was honoured in 2015, winning the Prince Claus Fund award for his pioneering work in culture and development through his cinematographic oeuvre.61 Mohammed’s main contribution to Syrian cinema lies in the genre of fiction drama. Prior

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to the Syrian uprisings, he co-directed two other films with Omar Amiralay and Mohammed Malas; Light and Shadows, the Last of the Pioneers:  Nazih Shahbandar and Moudaress (1996). In Mohammed’s auteur documentary films, violence takes centre stage, but where Step by Step very effectively conveys the heavy feeling of being surrounded by a dominant authoritarian state and patriarchal society, his next auteur documentary shows the direct outright violence of full-on war. Having made one of the best films in the history of Syrian documentary cinema, arguably Ossama Mohammed also has made one of the most controversial documentaries and, according to some, one of the worst. Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait (2014) is set in revolutionary Homs after the Syrian uprisings of 2011. It was the only Arab film screened out of competition during the 2014 Cannes Film Festival’s official selection.62 The first part of the film consists of aggregated mobile phone footage covering the demonstrations that were ultimately cracked down on. The film very quickly descends into a horrific show of extremely graphic scenes of massacres, involving body parts, human despair and extreme violence, all recorded by video activists on their mobile phones. It is, as Mohammed explains towards the end, a self-portrait of 1,001 Syrians and the director who processed all the mobile phone and digital video imagery from behind his laptop in Paris, where he was exiled.63 The horrific images include torture videos, bodies of children lying in the streets, a small boy kissing his father’s dead body farewell and disoriented street cats who wander in the apocalyptic urban environment of the besieged city of Homs.64 After the pretty horrific first part, which leaves the viewers numb, some of whom walked out of the audience in the pre-premiere of CPH:Dox in Copenhagen and a jury member of the Lisbon-Estoril Film Festival closed her eyes,65 the film gets more personal and narrates the story of Mohammed’s Facebook communication with a Kurdish-Syrian young woman, Wiam Simav Bedirxan, who lives in Homs and has been transferring video footage to Mohammed to show the destruction of her city. In fact, the film becomes Wiam’s film; the title of the film, Silvered Water, which is a free translation of her Kurdish name, reflects this, and she also became the co-director of the film. She is the main auteur, and Mohammed is merely the messenger. She tells her story, following a child, one of her pupils and her intimate images of the misery of war are gripping, emotional and poetic. Clinging on to the pegs of the laundry lines for some hope of a successful revolution, the viewer gets drawn in and instantly falls in love with Wiam, the woman behind the camera and the storyteller. She discovers music in an abandoned home, wishing well for the future of the



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children left behind and feels a strong sense of duty to tell the world through her camera. She gets in touch with Mohammed, who gladly takes up her request, putting himself in the film, rather dominantly. Two dimensions of the film have received strong critique: the unabated use of mobile phone imagery, in some cases most probably without consent, of the most gory and graphic aspects of war, amounting to a kind of war porn; and the relationship between Wiam and Ossama. It is without doubt that Ossama benefited greatly from this film; the first time he and Wiam met in person was during the Cannes Film Festival, when she managed to get out of Homs and join him to celebrate the film in a ceremony filled with deep emotions. However, Wiam is now volunteering as a teacher in the Atmeh IDP camp inside Syria, near the northern border of Bab al-Hawa while Ossama still thrives on the success of the film. It shows the difference in attitude towards why either Wiam or Ossama wanted to make this film. The film is very tough to watch and has garnered a great deal of controversy, with viewers asking questions as to whether this is cinema but also expressing ethical concerns about the graphic imagery, the dignity of the people appearing in the film and the mobile phone footage. Mohammed never mentions who is perpetrating the violence; we need to assume this is the Syrian regime.66 The graphic and violent imagery as well as representing Syrians as victims, its relationship between aesthetics, the obligations of cinema67 and whether these images are some kind of poetry are the cause of heated debates between Syrian documentary film-makers regarding whether this film was ethically and morally sound. Did the film lead to any intended effect to bring awareness to the world in order to assist the Syrian people in their revolution, which was the goal of Wiam of sharing her imagery, or did it put Mohammed’s name in the place of the pantheon of old masters who made revolutionary films? Some film-makers indicated that he went over the top and lost his bearing. Ossama Mohammed is very much present in the film, without having been involved in the actual shooting of the imagery; he directed Wiam from a distance. Do the cinema viewers really need to know how it looks and that a massacre involves body parts? For many criticizers, the film is made for a Western audience, and since this audience is still overwhelmingly orientalist, the imagery contributes to the demand for sensationalism about the Syrian war, but did it contribute to helping the Syrian revolutionary cause? Did the Syrian Revolution gain more solidarity through this film? The question is still open. Personally, I do not think the film screened at Cannes and around the world at festivals made any difference for the Syrian revolutionary cause. This has not so much to do with the director,

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although being a non-political film, it is hard to know with whom the viewer should have solidarity, but it also has to do with Western audiences who do not want to be confronted with the gory images of the Syrian war. Controversial as he is as a film-maker, Mohammed’s own interpretation of the graphic mobile phone imagery is as a vehicle for poetry and cinema: I believe in the depth of the Syrian moment in 2011; it was poetic. I deeply believe this. I  did not look at it as brutal. Everything is coming from the fountain of the first moment of this film, from the birth of this child, from the man who says I don’t know how to film, from people saying freedom. Just listening to the deepness of nature; listening to the sounds and images:  this can be poetry.68

Mohammed Malas Mohammed Malas was one of Amiralay’s closest friends. Unlike Amiralay, who studied film in Paris, Malas studied at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow. Malas had first worked as a school teacher between 1965 and 1968 and studied film from 1968 to 1974 in Moscow, where his peers included Ossama Mohammed and Abdellatif Abdelhamid.69 Malas and Amiralay met in Damascus when Malas returned from Moscow, and he became the co-founder of the Damascus Cine Club. Malas was born in Quneitra in 1945 and became a refugee from his own city after the 1967 war. This traumatic experience shaped most of his films, both fiction and documentary. After a string of short films, he made his first feature-length fiction film, Dreams of the City (1986), a semiautobiography, which established Malas as the first auteur of Syrian cinema, or Cinéma d′Auteur, which he formed with other repatriated Syrian film-makers like Ossama Mohammed, Samir Zikra, Abdellatif Abdul-Hamid.70 Together with other genres of new Arab cinema, Syrian cinéma d′auteur was committed to the striving for radical personal expression.71 Decisive influences in Malas’s work were the Six-Day War and his experience of being dislocated from his city of birth, Quneitra, and Soviet modernism cinema. Malas made for the most part fiction film, however, he also made non-fiction, and some of his documentaries are important to mention here because of their cinematographic quality, critique and historical value for Syria. His documentaries deal with people who lost their dreams and live with their nightmares, and stories revolve around memory, loss, dispossession, identity and amnesia.72 Interestingly, most of his documentaries are made with external



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support, from France or the Gulf, which also created problems with the NFO for Malas and his associates Omar Amiralay and Ossama Mohammed. When the three of them set up a private film company called Maram to attract external funding, the Syrian Ministry of Culture decided they had committed a crime against the state and fined them until international pressure made the ministry drop the case.73 Malas lived in the early 1980s in Palestinian refugee camps and interviewed over 400 Palestinians, which resulted in his acclaimed and most important documentary, Dream (1981/1987).74 Shot on 16-mm film, Malas interviews people about their dreams, in the camps of Sabra, Shatila, Bourj el-Barajneh, Ain al-Hilweh and Rashidieh.75 The film shows how Palestine is omnipresent in people’s memories and at the same time it is a forgotten dream of those who are dispossessed, something that Malas could strongly identify with, having lost his own city of birth due to Israeli aggression. Each interviewee in the film determines the cinematography of the sequence Malas leads us from dream to dream, dreams about winning the war, nightmares about incessant bombardments. Malas started filming in Sabra and Shatila in 1981, before the massacres by the right-wing Christian Phalange militias, took place in September 1982.76 On the fateful days between 16 and 18 September 1982, the Phalange militias, with knowledge from the Israeli army, massacred men, women and children in the camps. Malas was so upset by this event, which killed some of his interviewees, that he could not watch the footage for five years.77 Edited by Kais al-Zubaidi, his film eventually came out and won the first prize of the Festival International de Programmes Audiovisuels in Cannes in 1987.78 Another, much less discussed documentary, which Malas made for French television in co-production with the NFO, is Aleppo, Maqams for Pleasure (1998), where he explores the life and music of the classical Aleppan singer, composer and shaykh Sabri Moudallal (1918–2006). This fifty-two-minute documentary, shot on digital Betacam SP, follows the daily life of this eighty-three-year-old singer and his ‘turath’, oriental orchestra. The film gives great insight into Aleppo and its important role in the development and history of classical Arabic music. With his distinctive red fez, slightly tilted on his head, Moudallal represents the last of the great classical Arab singers of Aleppo, famous for the purest and best school of ‘tarab’, traditional music. The film is a wonderful portrait of this singer in the privacy of his house and at the public performances in Aleppo, his passion and knowledge of Arabic classical music suffuse the film, but like Shahbandar, Moudallal is the last of his kind. An ode to Aleppo and its music, this film is a musical journey of joy and grief about the almost lost craft of tarab.

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The final sequence of the film brings the viewer on top of the minaret of the great mosque of Aleppo, where Moudallal sings the call for the evening prayer, with the sunset on the background. This is unique archival footage as this minaret is now unfortunately lost in the war in Syria. The assistant director of this film was Hala al-Abdallah Yaqoub.

Hala al-Abdallah Yaqoub Starting as a regular and the most active visitor of the Damascus Cine Club since she was eighteen, Hala al-Abdallah, has been the driving force behind many of the films of the trio Omar Amiralay, Mohammed Malas and Ossama Mohammed.79 She was the executive director of both the films the illustrious trio made together; Moudarres (1994) and Shadows and Light (1994). She joined them when their production company Ramadfilm started twenty years ago in Lebanon, under the name of Maram CTV. Eventually, this production company went back to Syria and is now based in France. Hala worked since the 1970s as producer, scriptwriter and co-director for over fifteen French, Lebanese and Syrian fiction and documentary films.80 She was politically very active in the radical left of the 1970s and with her friends from the Cine Club found a platform to combine her love for cinema with her politics and resistance against authoritarianism. She also found the love of her life during her activism, the renowned Syrian painter Yousef Abdelke.81 When she was arrested for her political activism, she spent fourteen months in jail while he was incarcerated as well, after which they both went into exile in Paris. Despite an extremely low number of Syrian female film-makers of her generation and later generations, al-Abdallah can be seen as one of the most influential Syrian film-makers in the history of Syrian and Arab documentary, next to Omar Amiralay. Her contribution was crucial for the development of the films by Amiralay and he has been an inspiration to many young Syrian documentary film-makers until today. Stefanie Van de Peer calls her a pivotal element who held together some of the most important film-makers of the Arab world.82 Rasha Salti has called her the ‘most remarkably bold and compelling of experimental film-makers of the Arab World . . . Hala stands out as an oddly lone figure in this rare community of women film-makers, because she is a central figure in the making of some of the most remarkable masterpieces of Syrian cinema (directed by men), some produced by the NFO, yet without ever having been herself affiliated and maintaining her position as a singularly individualistic



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and fiercely independent filmmaker.’83 In other words, Hala al-Abdallah is a giant among masters of Arab cinema. Of the women documentary film-makers of her generation, there is only one other, Hala Mohammed, with whom al-Abdallah studied film at the University of Paris VIII.84 It took her until she was fifty to finally decide to direct her own documentary debut, which since has become the most direct critical attack to the authoritarian regime of Assad. Al-Abdallah’s film I Am the One Who Brings Flowers to Her Grave (2006) is possibly the most direct and damning critique of Hafez al-Assad made by the older-generation Syrian documentary film-makers, even more than Amiralay’s films. The film is a creative collaboration between Hala al-Abdallah and a younger-generation film-maker, Ammar al-Beik (whose work will be discussed later in this book). The film won the The Doc/It-Award at the 63rd Venice International Film Festival in 2006. Filmed in black and white, starts with her reflection that Hala always wanted to make films in her own country, Syria. This film is the most subjective and political auteur film85 and a kind of homecoming. Despite her exile in France, al-Abdallah, unlike her husband, had been able to negotiate with the regime to be able to visit Syria, legally. When she was approaching forty, her daughter was born. Now, she is almost fifty and is ready to make her own film, with all the ideas she ever had of making films. The film starts with interviews of al-Abdallah’s three closest friends: Fadia Lazkani, Roula Roukbi and Raghida Assad, with whom she dreamed of a better world and was sentenced to jail in the 1970s.86 The recordings are informal and intimate, enhanced by the many close-ups of the faces of Hala and her interviewees laced throughout the film. After ten minutes or so, we see a glimpse of Hala herself, which is rare in the film. She is in an abandoned building and someone is trying to open a door holding several different keys, looking for the one that is working. It is a church. There are close-ups of the faded paintings of apostles and mother Mary. We see how Hala’s hand lovingly touches the paintings. She explains her film project to the priest who let her in. She wants to show the recovering and cleaning of Christian icons. Her explanation is illustrated with a very strong close-up of the father’s face. The father shows how the colours of the icon can return by just cleaning it with a little cloth. The camera zooms in and out. In this sequence, it is a pity the film is in blackand-white. Hala’s co-director Ammar Beik explained to me that she ‘made this decision to unify the different materials shot with different cameras and to give one spirit to the film, you can say it’s an artistic and technical solution at the same time’.87

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At several sequences in the film, one gets the feeling of watching research footage for location scouting. There is a continuous conversation about the location and the setup of the sequence between the cameraman (co-director Ammar Beik) and Hala, the director, throughout the film. As if they are searching for the right spot and framing. In the interviews with her close friends, however, Ammar is not present; likewise, Hala is often not present in the sequences shot between Yousef Abdelke and Ammar al-Beik.88 Hala, as a leading voice-over for the film, introduces her co-director Ammar al-Beik through the footage he shot of the Syrian dissident-artist Yousef Abdelke, her husband. She introduces Yousef as someone who has lived in France for twenty-five years in gentle exile. Hala left Syria together with him in 1980, after Hala and Abdelke, who were strongly and openly connected to a radical left organization, had been sentenced to jail by Hafez al-Assad and released after less than a year.89 While Abdelke is making breakfast for their daughter, al-Beik is checking his camera and looks straight into the lens. Hala introduces him as a self-taught film-maker, who started with a film about her husband and when he gave up on the project, he gave her the footage. Consequently, she convinced him that they could make films collectively. Al-Beik then convinced her to make her film in his way so he shares with her the terrain of an intimate film, her beloved film. Characteristic of al-Beik’s cinematography is the insertion of extreme close-ups of the main protagonists of the film, which creates a sense of almost uncomfortable intimacy. The next scene takes us from Abdelke in exile in Paris to the Syrian coastal island of Arwad. Hala is travelling through Syria in advance of Abdelke’s return to his home country after twenty-five years and takes the opportunity to visit the locations that she wants to have in her film. Eventually, this becomes the basis of her film, a travelogue through the spaces, places and reminiscences of her homeland, revisiting the places where she imagined scripts and mapping out a geography of her emotions and memories.90 The Island of Arwad is a place of her youth. She reminisces about a story of the island when it was abandoned by the Ottomans and before the French arrived. There was only one boy there, living on the island in total freedom. The scene indicates that the director and her co-director are location scouting rather than filming, directing a boy to run towards the coast, while discussing how the scene will be included. Core to the film are the interviews with her three closest friends. Through these interviews we get to know the long-time activist friends of Hala al-Abdallah and their stories of a shared past and personal struggles in a very intimate way. They are broken souls. Remembering the first days after being released from



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prison, ‘When I came out of prison there were comrades in hiding. Others had escaped abroad and the rest were in prison. I  felt terribly alone. At the time apparently everyone felt that. Not like later when they release people in groups. They dispersed us in a terrible way. Yes, dispersed. Have you forgotten?’ asks one of her friends. Al-Abdallah repeatedly says on screen to the people she meets in the film, that she is doing this to make a film that has all the films in it that she ever dreamt of making. One idea she had always had, was to make a film about the poet Daed Haddad. She visits her friend Nazih Abouafach, another Syrian poet, to tell her everything about Daed Haddad and that she will put everything she has ever read into the film. Daed Haddad had a difficult life. Her friend explains the magnitude and the greatness of her poetry, specifically the poem with the line, ‘I am the one who brings flowers to her grave and suffers from the intensity of poetry.’ He repeats the sentence several times. Indicating the greatness of this poet and at the same time her tragic life. Daed Haddad committed suicide to end her life in 1991. In a cut back to the interviews with her girlfriends, Fadia talks about pain. Roula, talks about the different person she was, twenty-five years ago. She gets emotional. Twenty-five years ago, she was convinced that she was going to change the world. She was nothing like the person she is today, in exile, in France. She had many dreams that she was unable to fulfil. She was convinced, that she could do all that wanted to do. Twenty-five years ago, she was much braver and had trust in the world. Now, she has adapted to the circumstances and just lives her life. In the next scene, al-Abdallah has a particularly intense conversation with her mother-in-law, who survived the Armenian genocide. When she was eleven years old, all her family members were murdered in front of her eyes. She was saved because a farmer hid her underneath his coat. She came to Aleppo, she was alone. Adopted by an Arab family, she forgot her language and her heritage. But the memories are still present every day. Going back to the interviews with her friends, al-Abdallah listens to a story about survival guilt, and about the moment when her friend, an ex-prisoner, decided to go back to Syria. She was in France, and she had left her husband. Now she smelled the soil of the first rain after summer, and this reminded her of Hama. That is when she decided to go back to Syria. The director herself was arrested when she was twenty. She was very politically active. She spent fourteen months in jail. She later moved to Paris with her husband Yousef Abdelke. He was imprisoned himself again at a checkpoint in Tartous in 2013. He was released after one month. He then returned to Paris.

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In a very touching scene, al-Abdallah explains about her time in prison, where she shared a small space with around nine women, one of whom was the sister of her future husband. Al-Abdallah held her secret, which was her love for the man on the opposite side of her prison cell. She describes how she would write small letters to him that would go through a hole in the window and how she communicated with Yousef Abdelke. One day, the decision is made to move all male prisoners somewhere else. She is very sad and lets him know that her love is so deep, she will not let go. She arranges that she can be in solitary because she fakes an illness. She manages to look through a window and communicate with Yousef Abdelke. As he is with his comrades, he does not stretch out his hand to her because he cannot do that in front of his friends. She goes back out of solitary to her prison, disappointed. The scene is intersected with al-Abdallah dancing with her husband. Then we cut to the arrival of al-Abdallah and Yousef Abdelke at Damascus airport. Abdelke after twenty-five years of exile was given permission to enter his homeland. His mother is waiting for him. She has been waiting for twenty-five years. There is a big crowd of people and press covering the arrival of Yousef Abdelke. In the next scene, we see him standing next to the grave of his father, then a very happy gathering in an old house, the family dancing the dabke, many people having gathered. The film ends with a scene on the island of Arwad, where al-Abdallah is sure that this should be the poet Haddad’s final resting place. This was Hala al-Abdallah’s first solo film, but still, co-authored with Ammar al-Beik. The film itself is an essayist impression of the many ideas that Hala al-Abdallah has had during her entire life. As such, it is a meandering coming of middle-age film as Salti describes it.91 The film is non-linear but the buildup towards Abdelke’s arrival in Damascus on the airport and the scene where he hugs his mother after twenty-five years, gives the film an emotional outpouring towards the end. The film is a unique document as it gives insight into a generation of female Syrian revolutionaries from the 1970s who were full of dreams to change the world, ultimately defeated by the authoritarian systematic technique to crush dissidence as executed meticulously by the regime of Hafez al-Assad, a technique reminiscent of the same approach that his son Bashar took towards intellectual non-violent dissidence. The repeated oppression and structural violence traumatized al-Abdallah’s generation of fellow dissidents and left deep scars. This film is marked by the feelings of disillusions, deceit and defeat and can be regarded as one of the most critical of Syrian auteur films of the regime of Hafez al-Assad. The film was screened in more than fifty-five countries, winning awards at Dubai Film Festival, Tetouan Film Festival and at



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the Rotterdam Documentary Film Festival as well as a special award from the Italian Documentary Association at the Venice Film Festival.92 The film was censored in Syria. After her first documentary film, Al-Abdallah went on to make more authored films. The next film she made was Hey, Don’t Forget the Cumin (2008). Again, this is an authored, subjective and strongly personal auteur film about alienation (ghorbah), the alienation of exile but also the alienation of feeling out of place, wherever you are. Al-Abdallah never felt in place either in Syria or in France, and she knows to connect intimately with those who felt alienation in their lives. The film features three characters, her Syrian friend Jamil Hatmal from a Syrian leftist political party, British playwright Sarah Kane and actress Darina al-Joundi, also a friend of Al-Abdallah.93 The sequences about the three protagonists are intersected by footage of the Ottoman psychiatric hospital, or Bimaristan Argun, in Aleppo. A beautiful building that was purposely built for tired travellers, burned out people and psychiatric patients without any view on recovery. This beautiful building was filmed and used throughout the film as a symbolic place where madness is treated. Al-Abdallah experienced the madness of alienation while being in exile in France but at the same time also not feeling at home in Syria.94 This is an experience that she shares with the three protagonists of the film, but also with the young Syrian revolutionaries and film-makers in the Syrian uprisings. The words of young film-maker Bassel Shehadeh resonate these feelings of ghorbah when he is asked, in Singing to Freedom (2012), what is home for him, and he answers, ‘I do not feel I am home at all, sometimes I feel it but not all the time . . . it’s complicated’. Jamil Hatmal was thirty-eight when he committed suicide in 1994; Sarah Kane took her own life in 1999, at the age of twenty-eight, while the third character of the film survived a troubled youth in the Lebanese Civil War, therapy at psychiatric hospitals and self-imposed exile in Paris through art, writing and performing her experiences on stage. Al-Abdallah follows her while she is preparing, rehearsing and, eventually, her final performance at the Avignon Festival in France. The film explores how art can be an escape from ghorbah.95 It was not until a year into the Syrian uprisings, that Al-Abdallah made her next auteur feature documentary film. Al-Abdallah started filming As If We Were Catching a Cobra (2012) in the summer of 2010 and continued until the summer of 2012. The film captures the onset of the major uprisings that started in Tunisia and Egypt and eventually reached Syria. It is unsurprising that the film tells the story of the repression of freedom of expression, interviewing Egyptian and Syrian cartoonists, artists before and after the historic uprisings. Al-Abdallah

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follows, among others, young film-makers like Hazem Alhamwi, the Syrian cartoonist Ali Farzat and the Syrian writer Samar Yazbek months before the start of the Syrian Revolution in Damascus, up until her exile in France, five months after the start of the uprisings.96 The film is timely and allows the viewer to follow the trajectories of some of Syria’s most important artists and intellectuals. When Al-Abdallah was asked how she felt about the connection between art and revolution at an EuroMed event, she replied, Revolution is basically a radical change, and it has touched the people and industry of cinema. Neither filmmakers nor people are afraid any more. They are aware of their right to hold a position and keep to it. Some of our young filmmakers go to where the killing is just to be able to send us pictures; others raise their voices and face imprisonment. Several movies are still in preproduction, others have been finished and published on the internet. These films tackle things we could never talk about before, like the film ‘Hama 82’, which tells the story of massacres committed by the Syrian army in Hama in 1982 through archived materials and testimonies of families who witnessed the events. These filmmakers are strong and they have found ways to hide their tracks on the internet. (Naim, 2011)97

Because there is and was no film school in Syria and no prospect for any meaningful documentary film industry under the Assad regime, Omar Amiralay established the Arabic Institute of Film (AIF) in Amman, Jordan, aimed at filling this gap, with support from the Danish organization International Media Support (IMS) in 2005.98 A new young generation of Syrian film-makers then emerged for whom al-Abdallah was a major influence and great inspiration. The AIF existed between 2005 and 2008, after which it moved to Beirut and formed Screen Beirut. The first batch of young graduates from the AIF were Reem Al Ali, Rami Farrah and Hazem al-Hamwi. Together with Nidal Hassan, Ammar al-Beik, a young self-taught film-maker, and Joude Gorani, a female Syrian cinematographer and DOP, who returned from the NFO-funded scholarship at Fondation Européenne pour les Métiers de l’Image et du Son (FEMIS) in Paris in 2005. This group of film-makers formed a promising new generation. They started to use digital cameras to record their work and needed a lot fewer crew members to shoot their projects in contrast to the old masters of Syrian cinema who went on to film with large crews, even with digital cameras. Al-Abdallah played a big role in guiding and inspiring these young Syrians who gave a new boost to the genre of Syrian documentaries. They were interested in similar



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topics as with those in the 1970s – the occupation of Palestine, social pressure and socialist dissidence.99 However, new topics also emerged and more and more Syrian documentary film-makers began to tell their deeply personal stories, often critical of the Assad regime. With her legacy in Syrian documentary film, Al-Abdallah can easily be called one of the most important figures in the history of Syrian documentary films, not only by cementing a dissident form of creative documentary but also as a source of inspiration and bringing together and forming a network of excellent and very talented Syrian film-makers. Her persistent determination and creative work, before and after the Syrian Revolution, inside Syria and also outside in the Parisian Syrian diaspora, shows that art can overcome.100

Nabil Maleh On a relatively warm day in Lund, Sweden, during the 2013 Conference of the Nordic Society of Middle Eastern Studies, I had the privilege to meet with Syrian director and undisputed giant of Syrian cinema, Nabil Maleh. He was invited by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) at Lund University to present his film The Road to Damascus (2006), introduced by Professor Christa Salamandra, an authority on the work of Syrian television and the fiction features by Nabil Maleh.101 Nabil was an amicable and kind man, who gave me a warm greeting, with a big smile and a little twinkle from behind his glasses. His hair was grey but his outlook still youthful, although one could sense the deep grief he had for his country in turmoil. He reminded me of my Arabic teacher, Professor Mahmoud Fakhoury from Aleppo University. An erudite but also down-toearth person who had a genuine interest and heart for his country, Maleh was the most recognized Syrian feature film-maker since he produced his epic film The Leopard (1972), which won the Locarno International Film Festival’s Special Leopard Prize.102 The Leopard (1972) was the first feature film released by the NFO, and Maleh was the first Syrian film-maker who came back to Syria with a European film degree. Born into a prominent upper middle-class family, he went to the Czech Republic in the 1950s to study nuclear physics. But a side job as an extra in a film production changed the course of his life, and he started to study film at the prestigious Prague Film School (FAMU).103 The moment I  told him, during our first conversation in Lund, that I  had conducted long-term fieldwork living amongst farmers of the Khanasser valley in the South-east of Aleppo province, his eyes lit up and we connected

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immediately about the challenges and problems in the Syrian countryside that had been brewing prior to the Syrian uprisings. The Road to Damascus (2006) is one of the few documentaries that Maleh directed, a film which documents and literally maps out the situation and deep frustrations that were felt in the Syrian countryside prior to the Syrian Revolution in 2011. The film was shot in 2005, commissioned by the government, but because Nabil did not come back with the stories that the government wanted to hear, such as stories about prosperity, development and praise for the efforts of rural development by the government, eventually the film was banned inside Syria. Maleh eventually uploaded the film on his YouTube channel, when he moved his family and production company, Elba Productions, to Dubai in 2012.104 The documentation of the deep dissent and discontentment in the Syrian countryside in this road movie is a historical document for Syria. Interviews with rural people are taken in the midst of Bashar al-Assad’s reforms of the social market economy. This makes The Road to Damascus an important film to chart the preludes towards the outbreak of the street protests that emerged from the Syrian countryside in 2011. The documentary is not a cinematic gem. It is shot as a road movie that sets off from Damascus, a 3,000-km road trip around the country. The film begins with an interview with a young man from the north-western part of Syria, in the so-called Dead Cities  – old Byzantine settlements where people live scattered in between the olive trees. Alfoz Tanjour, who was doing camerawork for Nabil in this film, asks the man about his dreams when he was younger. The fellow is taken aback. He has no dreams anymore, he forgot them. The film is a compilation of a variety of short interviews, like vox pops either on the street, in cafes, along the road, at people’s houses. The crew drove with their car around the country and stopped where they saw fit to talk to people, not necessarily reflected in a route in the film which at times becomes slightly a messy edit, but enough to give an impression of the road they travelled. The images are accompanied by classical and Arabic musical scores and additional pieces sensitively composed on the song ‘Raoui  – The Story Teller’ by the beautiful voice of Souad Massi, which lifts up the film considerably. A dream for the future is a leading theme in the film. Many of the people answer that they do what they can to offer their children the best education and future, but the major problems are the lack of work and opportunities in the countryside. The first scene is shot in the so-called Dead Cities, where we see the major landmarks of places like Qalb al-Lowzeh. Nabil starts with a voice-over talking about the stories from people and soil. Introduced by white text on black. The next stop is Palmyra, or Tadmor, one of Syria’s major tourist destinations.



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Nabil interviews men in cafés, intersected by shots of the city and the tourism industry. The film-makers ask what is lacking, and each and every man they talk to indicates that everything is lacking – proper water, medical care; there is water pollution; unemployment; and projects that are developed in Palmyra, for example, in the tourism industry, employ people from outside. There are no factories; agriculture is forbidden because the city lies in a very dry climatic zone; and the men complain that they have no one but God and nobody cares about them. They deliver a damning critique of the government, which is not providing for these rural areas. Sending their children to cities like Damascus or Homs to find work and education is the only option. Nabil visits the poorest of the poor around Palmyra and finds a Bedouin who has eleven children, many of whom have glaucoma and need medical care. The beautiful portrayal of Palmyra stands in stark contrast with the socioeconomic crisis and misery of the local people. The next stage of the trip goes to the city of Deir Ezzor. The same stories are told – there is no work, no education. But now there are also women who talk to Nabil’s camera. A young girl explains that there is no one left in the villages except the older people. People who are left cannot work in agriculture anymore, there is not enough to make a living and the younger generation is migrating to the cities and urban areas in and around Damascus. There are more than two thousand students who are unemployed, one older man says, while playing backgammon and smoking sisha. The final interview set in Deir Ezzor is with a fifteen-year-old boy on the street who has lost all hope: ‘I want to be a martyr and blow myself up and go to paradise. I am sick of this world. Yesterday, I came out of jail. Not because I steal mobile phones, which I do, but there are many other charges against me. You ask me why I steal? To survive! I am fifteen years old, but I feel forty years old’; he takes another drag from his cigarette. The boy reminds strongly of the group of street boys and orphans that feature in another documentary of that year, Black Stone (2006) by Nidal al-Dibs, which I  will discuss later. The next part of the road trip goes to the northern Khabbour region. There, the men and women tell Nabil that they are going to Damascus, Latakia and Dera’a to survive. In the city of Raqqa, we see football-playing boys who are almost all school dropouts, and Kurdish women who want to go to Damascus and hope to find the best education for their children, because in this area there are no good educational institutions and no work. One of the most poignant parts of this scene is a visit to a village that had a thousand houses in the past and now has only twelve. Due to the poverty and impossibility to sustain livelihoods,

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all these people migrated to find work in Damascus because the village lacked everything. The migration of families from the north-east drought-stricken region in Syria is one of the reasons why so many internally displaced people camped at the outskirts of Damascus during the years 2009 and 2010, but the flow already started at the beginning of the 2000s. Through a detour in the Raqqa region, where Nabil finds the projectionist of an old and derelict cinema from 1962, we cross the Euphrates to the northwest where we find an old man and his younger son surviving. There is not enough land, nor jobs or water, and both are unhappy, but they do not feel they have a choice: this is the life in the countryside. People go to Lebanon and Damascus to search for work. At this point the film begins to become a little bit chaotic with shorter vox pops and a variety of people rapidly following each other. One girl says she has never left the village, she is a young woman, she has not even seen Latakia. Through the coastal western areas, we visit the village of Kadmous and Tartous where fishermen are interviewed, telling the same story of not enough fish or work. Finally, the film ends at a bus station where the buses gather to go to Damascus. Nabil has an epilogue: ‘We crossed more than three thousand kilometres from governorate to governorate, from village to village, from mountain to mountain and at last we are on our way back to Damascus. We found that the way has a meaning to us and to all the people heading that way. People are getting closer to a dream, others are getting closer to their home and others who are moving away from the dream . . . to Damascus . . . to Damascus’. In the final epilogue, we return to the Dead Cities and the first interviewed man who says, ‘We need a dream as a result of the oppression we are living.’ His remark is a summary of the inner feelings of those Syrians in the countryside who felt neglected, forgotten and oppressed by the Syrian government. The film was very moving for me to watch, at the end I  cried. This was a film that reminded me so much of my own time in Syria, living in the small desert village of Shallalah Saghirah. I  remembered giving a presentation to the ministry of agriculture and said there was no electricity in this village. The civil servant became angry with me, stating I was lying and every single village in Syria had electricity provided by the state. This was often the case: all was fine, there were no problems and anyone who dared to contradict was lying. Especially in Aleppo, there was a stark contrast between the countryside, where the ‘simple people lived’, as one Aleppian friend would say, indicating that these were the peasants of the village, and the educated urban elite lived in neighbourhoods like Shahbah, New Aleppo and other upscale areas in Aleppo city. Even within the city there was a growing stark contrast between rich and



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poor, whereby the rich lived on the outskirts and the poor in the city centre and the east of the city. Just outside the conference centre in Lund in September 2013, in the sun during the coffee break, Nabil and I reminisced and talked at length about the Syrian countryside and its people. ‘This was a rural uprising’, Nabil explained to me. ‘Everywhere I travelled for this film, throughout every corner of Syria, I  found people complaining about the government policies, about their predicament to make ends meet, about the drain of young people towards urban areas where there are more jobs, better quality of life, about the demise of Syrian agriculture, about the poverty, the lack of futures, I  documented their stories, their concerns, how it was, on my road back towards Damascus and that is why the film eventually got banned! I did not come back with the right stories for the regime.’105 The film was indeed initially commissioned by the Ministry of Culture in order to paint a good picture of rural development in Syria. Obviously, Nabil had not come back with the required stories, unfortunately for the regime. In 2010, the Syria Trust, a so-called NGO under the auspices of the First Lady Asma’a al-Assad, or FLONGO, a First Lady Organized NGO, did everything to paint a positive picture of rural development and progress in the Syrian countryside, in order to decorate the national reform project and social market economy that was propagated by the regime of Bashar al-Assad. This film was supposed to consolidate the achievements of these so-called rural development reforms. But Nabil found nothing of the kind during his travels for the film; being true to his mission as documentarian, he documented the complaints, the misery and the discontent of the people. This of course caused a problem for the regime, and the normal solution was to censor the film. It was never shown inside Syria. When Nabil left Syria in 2012, the film premiered six years after production at the Malmö Arab Film Festival in Sweden. The socioeconomic and rural roots to the Syrian uprisings is something that is often forgotten, but, in fact, I would argue that worsening social and economic divides, rather than sectarian divides, are central to the roots of the Syrian Revolution. Observing the increasing resentment in the countryside ever since the false promises of reform in 2000 by the Assad regime, assessing the models of economic growth and development model of Hafez al-Assad and the social market economy accelerated by his son Bashar, no analysis of the uprisings can be complete if these strong factors are not taken into account.106 Meeting Maleh in Sweden in 2013 was a unique opportunity and I  am deeply grateful that I  have been able to meet this giant of Syrian cinema.

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After our conversation, which centred around the rural roots to the Syrian uprisings, I told him the story about my experience of watching this special fiction film in Damascus, years ago. It was only in my conversation with Maleh there and then, that I  realized I  was talking to the director of this film! The film I had watched in Damascus was The Extras (1993), his other well-known feature fiction film besides The Leopard (1972). The story of a young couple was shot entirely in a tiny apartment in Damascus, giving me a suffocating feeling when I walked out to the street. The Extras (1993) was shown in Damascus in public in 2010, when Nabil was invited as a guest to the Danish Institute in Damascus, in the beautiful old Ottoman palace Beit Akkad, located in the Old City. In the Q&A, he talks at length how the NFO and the Ba’athist regime tried to prevent distribution and screening of the film, which eventually became the most popular feature film ever in the history of Syrian cinema.107 During the Damascene Spring of 2000, Maleh was active in civil society and assisted in the establishment of the Committee for the Revival of Civil Society, which called for reform of Ba’ath party domination in the sociocultural life.108 This brought him later into trouble with NFO officials after which he decided to dedicate his efforts in seeking non-NFO funding for his films. He set up the film production company Ebla Productions (named after his daughter) and started to film commissioned work as well. Maleh’s documentary work is not extensive; some of it is in fact quite quirky. it is clear he felt much more at home in fiction film than the documentary. His film Holy Crystal (2008) was commissioned by the Syrian Commission for Family Affairs. Maleh’s documentary talks about the search that Reem, a Christian lady from Damascus, has set herself to do for her master’s thesis. She is in search for something called the Holy Crystal, something she read in a book that she cannot remember any more. We follow her quest in Damascus. The film shows the cosmopolitan city centre of Damascus and also the many tourists who come there. Reem herself does the voice-over. She seems a bit naive quest. We get a good insight into contemporary Damascus as it also explores the relationship of Christians to the capital. In her quest to ask if people know about the Holy Crystal, Reem, together with her friend Suzan, leads us through the Old City of Damascus. We are led through the markets past the shop owners into the narrow streets and eventually as well to the churches and the mosques. It gives a great introduction to the diversity of Damascus. Some thirteen minutes into the film we see very rare footage of the Jewish synagogue in Damascus, where the Jewish



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community is performing a Shabbat prayer. This is an interesting aspect of the film, because the Jewish quarters in Damascus were always heavily guarded by the secret police and it was very difficult to even take a photograph. Because the film was authorized by the Commission for Family Affairs, Nabil could get permission. It was part of the narrative by the Assad regime to propagate Syrian society as very diverse, where ethnic groups and sects were living side by side in peace. The film portrays it as if it was easy to enter and visit the Jewish synagogue but in fact it was forbidden for tourists, and anyone asking about Jewish families in the Jewish quarter would be suspected by the secret police. But this film is specifically made to show the diversity of Syrian society, both religiously and ethnically. Reem and Suzan walk all over the old city of Damascus and still cannot find anyone who knows the Holy Crystal or where to find it. The day turns into evening, and the ladies sit down. This part of the film is clearly a staged and very peculiar scene. Reem gets a phone call from someone who says he has found the Holy Crystal. Excited, they make an appointment for the next day. And the next day, she goes to a rooftop, where a film crew is recording a film called The Holy Crystal. The director of the film explains to her that what they were looking for was always in front of their eyes, but if you are looking for the whole world you will not find it. Damascus is the Holy Crystal, they were looking for it: the city has every religion there, all the different people, Jewish, Christian and Islamic, and it has been that way since thousands and thousands of years. The film is written by Nabil Maleh and absolutely uncritical towards the Syrian government. One might think where this film was screened? Who was its audience? In fact, we don’t really know. It was made by the Commission for Family Affairs, and it definitely is not Maleh’s best work but most likely its main audience was actually Syrian.

Abdellatif Abdelhamid Part of the first generation of directors, Abdelhamid has directed two short documentaries for the NFO in Syria. He worked as an assistant director to Mohammed Malas on several of his films and played leading roles in Ossama Mohammed’s fiction films. Abdelhamid is a widely acclaimed film-maker with great popular appeal in Syria and the rest of the Arab world. His work, however, has never been very critical of the Assad regime, and he still works in Syria for the NFO.

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Walid Kowatli In contrast to Abdellatif Abdelhamid, the Soviet-trained director of drama television, film and theatre, Walid Kowatli, took a very critical stance against the Assad regime after the uprisings in 2011 and chose the side of the opposition. I  met Walid in 2014, in Gaziantep, Turkey, where the National Opposition Government is located. During my fieldwork with Syrian video activists from Aleppo and Raqqa, in Gaziantep, my Syrian friend, with whom I was staying, invited me to meet her friends from Damascus, who had just arrived in the Turkish city. She assured me that, as a film-maker myself, I would like the visit. Indeed, there was Walid Kowatli, a director of the same generation as Nabil Maleh. Sitting in an urban park on plastic chairs, we started talking. Walid is a tall man and wears casual clothes but distinctively walks with the stature of a director. He was born in 1946 and has a higher degree of theatre directing from Bulgaria. Between 1976 and 1999, Walid was director at the TV Drama Department of Syrian television, while at the same time teaching as a professor at the High Institute of Theatrical Arts in Damascus. Since the 1970s, Walid developed many theatrical plays including works written by himself and translations of other plays, both Arabic and Western theatre plays. Walid moved eventually to the Gulf region, where he continued his theatre directing. According to Walid, Syrian artists could only be free if they are outside the regime areas; there is no way that Syrian artists are free and can be within the Assad regime. It was only until after the Syrian Revolution that Walid made a documentary. Syrian Children Rise to Heavens (2014) was written and directed by Kowatli. It is a twenty-four-minute documentary sponsored by the Syrian Business Forum and portrays the children of the Free Childhood project near Yalda Camp, on the Syrian-Turkish border, that was led by Kowatli and a number of Syrian artists. The film starts with gruesome mobile phone footage of the aerial bombardments of the city of Aleppo and villages in northern Syria, in the liberated areas, done by video activists on the ground. Then a series of interviews with children of around ten years, telling in detail what happened to them. There is an interview with a Turkish aid worker, who has difficulties recounting the encounter with a girl from Syria who lost her mother, her father and all of her grandparents. She was completely alone. The film is about the children who are targeted in the Syrian war, who express a deep hate for Bashar al-Assad. They have dreams of the fall of the regime. We see the activities in the camp that entertain the children, making paintings and theatre to recover from their traumas. The



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voice of Fairouz leads us through the questions: Why are children targeted in war, what have they done? The film ends with grass-roots video imagery of the chemical attacks in Douma, dead bodies of children, babies, a short clip of a girl who is playing just before she gets killed. It is hard to watch these scenes. In the end Walid included a mobile phone video shot of the chemical weapon being fired by the Syrian Army. This film is made for the Free Childhood project and in a way it gives a sense of relief that these children are now safe, but the deep injustice and grief stays with the viewer for a long time after watching this film. Kowatli made a direct point to focus this film on children: ‘If there is one single reason to take Bashar al-Assad to justice it is because he simply is a brutal childkiller’, Walid told me on that warm August evening in an urban park in Gaziantep in 2014.109

Hala Mohammed Born in Latakia, Hala Mohammed studied film-making in Paris, at the University of Paris VIII, just like her friend Hala al-Abdallah. As a journalist, she worked for the Hot Spot programme of Al Jazeera and made several documentaries.110 She is married to the Syrian director Haytham Hakki and lives in Paris. She is a well-known poet who has been writing poems since 1994 and authored five collections. Her poem ‘This Fear’ was written after she made the film Journey into Memory (2006) about ex-political prisoners in Syria. Among her films, this one is the most exceptional and bravest documentary that Hala Mohammed has made. Out of five hundred ex-prisoners that she met for the film, she chose to work with writer Yassin al-Haj Saleh, poet Faraj Bayrakhdar and playwright Ghassan Jibai. It was a road movie in which the three ex-prisoners would make a journey back to Tadmor, the prison they had been in, otherwise known as, the city of Palmyra. They had agreed only to talk about humanitarian aspects and not politics. Still, Hala felt scared doing the movie. She was harassed by the Syrian secret police and wrote the poem ‘This Fear’: I can’t handle this window that opens to alienation It’s like a wall I see nothing through it I can’t handle this window that opens to alienation

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In Journey into Memory three writers, Ghassan Jibai, Yassin al-Haj Saleh and Faraj Bayrakhdar, embark on a 220-km journey back to the infamous jail of Palmyra, where they spent years as political prisoners, recalling the spirit that helped them survive torture and isolation. The film was broadcast by Al Jazeera English  – Witness Series in 2010111 and chronicles the spirit that kept these three writers alive during their time of incarceration and torture in Tadmor. It is located on the road to the popular and splendid ruins of the city of Palmyra in the heart of the Syrian desert, a reminder of great ancient civilizations that thrived in the distant past. But Palmyra is also called Tadmor, a name that instils fear in the hearts of many Syrians, as it is the name of one of the most notorious prisons in Syria. In the 1980s these men were jailed in this prison as political prisoners without any form of trial or charges. This trip is their first journey back to Palmyra since their release. The film starts with the three prisoners on their way to Palmyra. They introduce themselves by their name and their profession and how many years they were in prison, between them some forty years. They tell their stories inside the minibus that takes them to Tadmor. On the road from Damascus to Palmyra, which is around two to three hours, they all describe the torture they went through. They themselves have never seen the tourist site with its magnificent ruins. The interview with the three is very well recorded, intersected with them looking out of the window and rider shots. It is the first time they are going back to this place without shackles and without blindfold. They talk about the so-called parties, especially the welcoming party in Tadmor prison. There was nothing worse than this ‘reception party’, which was an accumulation of brutal torture, enjoyed by the prison guards just for the sake of torture. For the ex-prisoners, the road movie is not an ordinary trip. Yassin states that he wants to go there but only with company; he can never visit like a tourist. All of them had been imprisoned for many years, ranging between ten to seventeen years. Yassin cannot just go there like this, it needs to be something special. The car passes the famous Baghdad Café alongside the road between Dmeir and Palmyra. They talk about events that happened during their imprisonment. One day a priest came to Ghassan and asked him and others what they needed, if they were looking for anything. It took Ghassan courage. Others asked for more books or more fresh air and so on, but he asked the priest, ‘I want to ask you a question: Why are we here in the prison, did we carry arms against you? Like the terrorists? Did we work with a foreign state? Did we take money from anyone? Did we commit crimes



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under the law?’ He answered me, ‘You are a political criminal.’ After listening to this story, Yassin replied to Ghassan that they would take political activists, especially the leftists, to Tadmor prison; ‘They were not after interrogation but punishment, because we rejected a compromise.’ They took the leftist activists, there were thirty of them and some had agreed to compromise and some of them had agreed to work with the secret police to write reports on people. Three officers from the political security told these collaborators they would be sleeping at home tomorrow. This ‘tomorrow’ turned out to be five and a half years in Palmyra. The stories are intersected with travel shots and gloomy desert tunes as background music. The writers talk to each other in the minibus and say that this kind of film will be an excellent tool for educating the younger generations, so that they do not experience the same tragedies. They agree that no one can get over these traumatic experiences unless they talk about them. Ghassan and Faraj are sitting on the back seats with Yassin in the middle, the camera films them in a three-shot to capture their conversation. For two years Yassin did not get any visits from his family, but when he was transferred to Palmyra he received the family visits again. ‘These visits make you feel alive again’, he said. Ghassan, the theatre director, talks about how difficult it was to write, because this was forbidden by the guards. He says, ‘In Palmyra the jailer is present all of the time. In Adra the jailers have indirect presence. They aren’t so harsh. In Palmyra, there was a strong fear present at every moment. We felt no security. All the time, we felt anxious and squeezed. We were feathers on the wind.’ Silence among the three men in the microbus and long shots of the car driving towards Tadmor give the viewer time to digest what has just been said. They continue: how to survive the prison is to make prison your home, to confide in it and not think about release. All of them were arrested under Syria’s martial law, so none of them knew when they would be released; they were not given the luxury to be able to count their days. So the prison became their world, their family and their home. Ghassan explains that when he was arrested, his son was only forty days old. He saw him again after three years, when they were allowed visits. ‘He would put out his hand to greet me in the space between the two grills and the guard. I put my hand out but I could barely touch his fingertips. During one visit, the warden asked if we had any requests. I raised my hand and I asked, “Do you have children?” “Why do you ask?” he said. I replied, “You hug them maybe every day, I haven’t talked to my boy or smelled him for years. Can you allow me to hug my boy one time only, because he needs me?” I think it affected him because

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he said “yes” and I could hug my son for the first time, in six years. I smelled my son, like I have never smelled him before.’ The three men reflect on the silence of the prison and how, for example, the sound of a mule or a donkey would make them happy, because it meant there were people close, there was life. Faraj reflects that since the eight years that he has been out of prison, he has had no energy or time to read or look at the notebooks he wrote in the prison. Maybe he cannot set himself to do it, because they lost their function as they had helped him to keep alive in the prisons. Faraj left prison with eight manuscripts for fourteen years. For the next three years, after he got out of prison, he was not able to write any new poems. He was just revising the old ones. After three years he thought they were ready for publication and then the prison period closed for him. But then Faraj explains that he would need a thousand books to describe what happened to him inside the prison, that the prison is a place where fear becomes a lifestyle. He also describes how he had been seven years impotent because of the prison time and that some of his comrades until now still have no sexual competency. He blames it on the long-term physical and psychological torture they endured. The film then is intersected with static shots of the prison itself, of abandoned isolation cells. Gradually the conversation leads to love and women, how the prisoners created a vision of the ideal woman in their head. Hala Mohammed subtly inserts a drive-by shot of a billboard advertisement for a king-sized bed. The symbolic reference to this is subtle but clear. Ghassan remembers how he was allowed a visit from his wife and son and he received a book. In the book he found a hair in the shape of the letter S, the first letter of the name of his wife. He kept it for seven years. It was a pure coincidence but it let him dream for seven years. The last two minutes of the film, the car enters the ancient site of Palmyra, and Yassin reacts. This is the first time he has seen Palmyra, and he wonders how they could locate a prison next to this grand and fantastic place in the desert? The grandeur of the archaeological site stands in stark contrast with the stories we have just heard. The car drives in and the three men get out of the car and walk through the majestic ruins. What follows is a beautiful and scenic compilation of close-up portraits of the three men in the ruins of Palmyra: Yassin looks over to the castle, Ghassan looks into the distance with tears in his eyes and Faraj sits on a pillar, looking around. The poetic compilation has a deep emotional impact; the close-up shots of the men are connected through cross-dissolves. The years of torture and incarceration are visible in the amazement and disbelief in the ex-prisoners’ faces. The images are warm, with subtle flute music in the



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background. A wide shot of the magnificent theatre and a final wide shot of the three men walking among the ruins close the film. This is the most important and critical work that Hala Mohammed has directed and filmed. It is the first documentary film that directly conveys the torture and years of oppression in the Syrian prison system. It was also a very brave film to make in 2005, when it was impossible to gain any permission for such a film. The set-up in the car obviously was a brilliant solution for this and the fact that the three ex-prisoners do not talk about politics. However, the film was banned in Syria, although it was broadcast on the Witness Al Jazeera English strand so it definitely was watched inside Syria. Hala Mohammed has not made any other significant documentary films; instead she has focused on writing and publishing poetry. She is a renowned Syrian poet. In 2012, Yasmin Fedda directed a film about Hala Mohammed the poet, for Al Jazeera English, in which she combines Hala’s poetry with a portrait of her life in exile in Paris and her reflections on the Syrian Revolution and how poetry played an important role in inspiring change.

Hanna Ward Hanna Ward is one of the old cinema masters of Syria, a cinematographer and DOP who worked with Omar Amiralay, Ossama Mohammed, Samir Zikra and almost all Syrian cinema directors from the 1970s. He worked with Nabil Maleh on the film the Leopard as an assistant. He still thinks the best film ever made in Syria is The Extras by Nabil Maleh, ‘It is a very honest film. In fact, The Leopard was the first film I ever saw, it inspired me. It is why I wanted to film.’112 After this first experience in film production, he left for Moscow. He had a classical education and like Ossama Mohammed and Mohammed Malas, he studied film in Moscow with support from the Soviet Union. Film education has been the major challenge for Syrian cinema; there simply has not been any opportunity for film-makers to get a good film education at home, as Ward explains.113 For Syrian students there was a lack of basic education. There was nothing really that I could find as a good classical education. So many of us went to Russia . . . I didn’t get a scholarship for my studies from the Syrian government. For the scholarship you needed 65% of your exam and mine was 58%, so I didn’t get a scholarship. I went to the Ministry but they didn’t want to speak to me. This was 1969. So in Moscow, I went to the cultural attaché and I received a grant from

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Documenting Syria: Film-making, Video Activism and Revolution there. I stayed eight years in Russia. Because Ossama took a long time finishing his first film which was my graduation film as a cameraman. We filmed it in a small village in Syria. The lighting was mostly done indoors, we had gasoline lights and reflectors. Finally we made it and I graduated.114

Hanna’s graduation film project was Step by Step, directed by Ossama Mohammed. After his graduation he started working as an assistant cameraman and then gradually worked his way up to cinematographer and DOP employed by the NFO. As a Syrian cinematographer with the NFO, I  always had access to the best equipment. For Land for a Stranger (1998), the Ministry of Culture was responsible. The Minister at the time was Najah Al Attar (1976–2000). The film had a budget for 300,000 US dollars but we bought US$650,000 worth of equipment. The next day received this problem, we must fix the deal before the end of the year or we would lose the funds. The Prime Minister stepped in directly to save the film. From the professional side, we received all the support. It was not like in the Soviet Union. But there was and still is a lot of mismanagement of the National Film Organisation. For example there is no film archive, all the 35mm films are stored somewhere in Damascus but not in one place. It is scattered. Just in a sort of cellar, there is no organization. There is not a specially designed building or something. I now live outside Syria, in Germany. I will not respect my government, which doesn’t protect my history. Many Syrian artists are now here and I am making new films. I am working with them.115

It became impossible for Hanna to continue working under the dictatorship of Hafez al-Assad. Hanna left Syria in 1999 to stay in the Gulf until 2010 when he moved to Germany, where he now resides. We talked about my trip into Syria in 2014, for just a couple of days to visit places like Daret Ezzah and Atarib. I talked to him about the trip and we went to see Jebl shaykh Barakat, which was previously inaccessible because a military base was there. But since the Free Syrian Army (FSA) took over, this place had become abandoned. Jebl Shaykh Barakat is a large hill next to the town of Darat Izza and has an ancient Greek temple on top. It is in the middle of the so-called dead cities, Byzantine temples and monasteries. I went there in August 2014, as the only foreigner, overlooking the plains of Darat Izza. My story of this special trip triggers some memories from Hanna Ward: ‘Do you know Beit Ghazalah in Aleppo? The owner was from Darat Izza. I was the DOP of the film Land for a Stranger (1998); we filmed part in Darat Izza and in Beit Ghazalah and Beit Jumblatt in the Old City of Aleppo. In 1995. It is about the philosopher Abdel Rahman al-Kawakibi.’116



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Figure 1.2  Zikra and Ward on the set of Land for a Stranger in Aleppo © H. Ward.

The docudrama Land for a Stranger (1998) is a long feature-length film, shot in Aleppo, which tells the life-story of the famous Syrian philosopher and religious figure Abdel Rahman Al-Kawakibi, who lived from 1852 until 1902 and advocated an enlightenment of Islam in the face of fundamentalism (see Figure 1.2). The film was directed by the lauded fiction film-maker and master of cinema, Samir Zikra, another graduate of the Russian State Institute for Cinematography. Zikra worked on several film projects with Mohammed Malas

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and Nabil Maleh and is known as a socialist realist in cinema but has directed few documentaries, besides three shorts in the first half of the 1970s about the Yom Kippur war. Land for a Stranger (1998) is the only feature-length docudrama. One can dispute whether this film is a drama-documentary, as it has dramatized the life of Abdel Rahman Kawakibi entirely in a historical epic set in Aleppo.117 Kawakibi was a scholar of Islam who was often put in jail because of his reformist ideas and pan-Arab critique of irrationalism in the Muslim world.118 Zikra is an important director in the history of Syrian cinema. Like all others he was employed with the NFO. Political and personality problems and power struggles between the various masters of cinema arose while being employed at the NFO. There were struggles between, for example, Ossama Mohammed and Omar Amiralay versus Samir Zikra, while Nabil Maleh and Mohammed Malas were sometimes in between. As cinematographer, Ward had to stay neutral in between these antagonized relationships and he chose to work as well together with younger-generation Syrian directors such as Alfoz Tanjour, who in Ward’s view has made some of the best opposition films both fiction and documentary. Tanjour’s film A Little Sun (2007) is very critical towards the regime. It was his first NFO-sponsored short film drama. After the uprisings, Tanjour made many television documentaries for the Al Jazeera documentary channel such as Syria: The Battle Beyond (2014) and Death of Aleppo (2016). His latest film A Memory in Khaki (2016) has been doing a trailblazing festival round.

Mohammed Ali al-Atassi It was a cold day in Copenhagen on 27 April 2016, when I walked outside of a metro station towards a hotel next to a train station. The newly established Syrian Cultural Institute in Denmark organized a screening of the film Our Terrible Country (2014) directed by Syrian film-maker Mohammed Ali al-Atassi. My good friend June Dahy, a Danish-Syrian associate professor in Arabic Language at the University of Copenhagen, our introduced me to al-Atassi after the screening. In the hotel lobby, Syrian journalist and documentary film director Ali al-Atassi was waiting for me for an interview, which eventually turned into spending a whole day together in Copenhagen, discussing many things about Syrian cinema, documentary film-making, activism and the Syrian Revolution. I had first encountered Ali al-Atassi’s work when he filmed with Riad al-Turk, one of the early opposition figures of the Damascus Spring in the year 2000, which occurred after encouraging remarks from the newly minted president



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Bashar al-Assad. Riad al-Turk is also called Ibn al-Am (the cousin). He is seen as one of the major intellectual fathers of the Syrian uprisings. During the Damascus Spring meetings, political gatherings and discussion fora had been popping up all over Damascus, and Riad al-Turk had played an important role as participating intellectual and political leader. Mohammed Ali al-Atassi was born in 1967 from the al-Atassi family, a prominent Hashemite family from Homs, known for centuries as dignitaries, muftis and major figures in Syrian history. His father was Nureddin al-Atassi, president of Syria between 1966 and 1970, who was arrested by Hafez al-Assad and imprisoned for the next twenty-two years without charges or trial. Ali was three years old when his father was put in prison, released only because he needed medical treatment for a heart attack and cancer, of which he soon after died in Paris on 3 December 1992.119 Ali received a diploma in engineering from Damascus University in 1992 and a degree in history from the Paris-Sorbonne University (Paris 4) in 1996. After his studies, he became a journalist and started writing for Arab and international newspapers. He has made four documentary films to date: Ibn al Am (2001),120 Waiting for Abu Zayd (2010),121 Ibn Al Am-online (2012)122 and Our Terrible Country. In 2000, Ali purchased a small digital high-end video camera and started filming with one of the major figures in the Damascene Spring, Riad al-Turk. This was his first try at making a documentary portraying the daily life of Riad al-Turk, a Syrian dissident, who spent eighteen years of his life in Syrian prisons. At the same time, the trio of Ossama Mohammed and Mohammed Malas also were contemplating making a film with Riad al-Turk, but the difference was that Ali al-Atassi was filming by himself with this small camera, while older-generation film-makers used to work with large crews and did not know how to make a film with a very small crew.123Ali al-Atassi made his first documentary with just two people, himself and Riad al-Turk, which gives the film a level of intimacy that was unprecedented in Syrian documentary film. Ali al-Atassi self-funded this first documentary about Riad al-Turk, Ibn al Am (2001). The film starts poignantly with Riad talking to Ali, the film-maker, asking him if he knows how to do this kind of project, whether it should not be done by someone who has experience with film? Riad al-Turk is a dissident who was released in 1998, after eighteen years. The film was made during the Damascene Spring, the year after Bashar al-Assad became president after the death of his father Hafez al-Assad. ‘The cousin’, which is the nickname of Riad al-Turk, played a crucial role in the Damascene Spring. He had been a member of the Syrian Communist party

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since 1944 and the film is a portrait of his life. It is filmed in Damascus at a time of relative openness in political space. It is the only documentary from Syria with actual footage used of the political salons and gatherings that took place during the years 2000 and 2001 in Damascus. From that point of view, this documentary is unique in the collection of documentaries prior to the Syrian uprisings. As such the film is an important historical document for Syrian history. The first question that Ali asks Riad is, after he got out of prison did the prison ever get out of him? ‘No’, Riad replies. ‘It’s not that I am afraid of it, or something. But because prison presents oppression and oppression is still practiced in my country. Destroying prison is a major goal on which the country’s liberty depends. The prison is built to make people scared. People try as much as they can to avoid prison. They shut themselves up, to adapt to the situation. They run away from the material prison towards a moral one, which is worse.’ The clarity of thoughts, the resilience and resolve for a better society in Syria filters through the interview with Riad al-Turk, who displays such incredible mental strength. Ali felt it was important to make this film, not only because Riad al-Turk is such an important intellectual but also because with his seventeen years of incarceration, Riad symbolized for Ali a kind of fatherlike figure. His father, Nureddin al-Atassi, had mostly been absent from Ali’s life; he had never been able to know him very well, because he was three when his father was jailed and twenty-five when he was released only to live very briefly after.124 At the time of filming, Riad al-Turk had returned to his practice as a lawyer in Damascus, which he saw as a kind of income security. But he could not do without politics. He indicates during the filming that he cannot live without politics, it is in his blood. ‘It’s bigger than this, it’s bigger than me’, he says. At the time of filming, the Syrian regime had opened up since the inauguration of Basha al-Assad as president. There was a kind of hope that reform would now be possible. On 17 July 2000, Bashar al-Assad made his inaugural speech in which he called for economic reforms, a greater role for the private sector and legal reforms. Therefore, Ali asks Riad in the film if there is now a chance for democracy. ‘No!’ says Riad loudly. ‘This is a mistake that we make, the regime will not change.’ He has no trust that Syria could develop into a democracy under the leadership of this Assad family and the Ba’athist regime. Riad al-Turk, who was First Secretary of the Syrian Communist Party, famously wrote the sentence ‘Syria cannot remain a Kingdom of Silence’ in his article in Al Quds al Arabi on 26 July of that same year, criticizing the hereditary succession of the presidency and calling for democracy in Syria.125



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The film follows Riad al-Turk in his daily life. Ali has unprecedented and intimate access to Riad. When he is making his bed for the day, Ali asks him if he had a bed in prison. Riad replies, ‘They gave me one in 1990 when I got sick, and before that I slept on the floor.’ In prison, he slept approximately ten years on the floor, without a bed. Then Riad graphically describes the horrific ways of torture in prison that he suffered, comparing it with what his fellow inmates from the Muslim Brotherhood received, which was far worse. The film then continues about the four things that kept Riad sane in prison. One of the major pieces of advice he gives to future prisoners is to forget about the outside world. He himself solved it by collecting the black stones from the lentil soup he received almost daily, and he made temporary patterns with the stones on the bed sheet he had. He also exercised in his cell of 2 × 2 metres, and he made sure that he ate everything, to keep his body healthy. The film follows Riad to Homs, where he grew up in an orphanage. The crew drives through the city centre to the front door of the orphanage. Ali asks if they can go inside, but Riad refuses; he does not want to be confronted with the past. He tells Ali that he might be interested in other things than him. Ali turns the conversation towards Riad’s marriage and two daughters. The film-maker asks Riad if he does not feel guilty about his daughters, not having been around for their education and upbringing. But Riad does not understand the question. He feels he has fulfilled his duty as a father by not giving in to the regime and giving an example for his daughters of a father who stood strong for his principles. The next scene is filmed at the International Airport of Damascus. Riad is picking up his daughter and grandchildren who are arriving from abroad. Asked whether he would reconcile his political activities with being a father, this is difficult, he says. A political press conference is in the planning, where Riad will speak. Ali asks if he would be willing or happy if his daughter attends the conference. ‘Certainly not’, Riad replies. The airport scene is followed by a rare recording of a political press conference in Damascus by Riad al-Turk. During the speech he says that Syria is not a real presidency and not a real kingdom, he raises his voice and challenges all the mukhabarat, the Syrian security services, and he directly challenges the newly minted president to show one document that relates him to the Muslim brotherhood. The film ends. Ali says of his own relationship to Riad al-Turk:  ‘It is like the story of my own father. It was an honour to know Riad al-Turk, I  filmed him again in 2011 to remember him as an iconic figure in the Syrian Revolution. He was living in hiding. We used Skype to communicate while I was in Beirut and we had someone who shot the film in Damascus. Throughout my films there are

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father figures. How to find the father figure – maybe this is the question for me. Myself, I have never had the chance to live with my father, so father figures are a paradigm, it is a central theme to my films.’126 It took nine years before Ali made another film – in 2010 he made a documentary about the Egyptian scholar and philosopher Abu Zeid. When the Syrian Revolution broke out, Ali got back in touch with Riad who was in hiding in Damascus. He decided to make the sequel to the first film about Riad al-Turk. This became Ibn al Am – on-line (2012)127 and was uploaded on YouTube after which the film quickly went viral. From his place of hiding, beautifully shot we see an old man reflecting and also finally happy that the revolution he had always dreamt of finally was taking place, although he refused to accept the label of father of the revolution. The young generation was making Riad al-Turk proud. The film is filmed at the beginning of the street protests. While making his trademark lentil art on a blank sheet, Riad al-Turk comes slowly into the shot from a dissolved hazy image while we hear the revolutionaries singing: ‘Relax, father, Relax. We don’t want Assad. We want Freedom.’ The filming started on 15 March 2011 and continued until the beginning of 2012. It is a tribute to Riad al-Turk and his dedication to democracy and freedom in Syria. The film was recorded both in Damascus and in Beirut, where Ali lives. He recounts how he by accident turned into a film-maker when he did his first film about Riad al-Turk. Now, since the 2011 uprisings, Riad al-Turk has turned back to underground activities and Ali returns to Riad al-Turk. Ali is filmed while he is trying to connect and Skyping with Riad, who resides in Damascus, where a local crew films him inside his house. The sequences in Damascus are sensitively composed, portraying the eighty-year-old revolutionary in his old Damascene house, close-ups of his hands while smoking his cigarette, listening to radio about the latest opposition meetings in Turkey and slowly walking, crossing the courtyard of his house with a plastic bag in his hands. Most of the film is a medium shot of Riad al-Turk talking to Ali through Skype while smoking cigarettes. Riad reflects on the news that young protesters go out on the streets of Syria: ‘I like the headline of yesterday. Opposition in your 70s, Revolution in your 20s. Great words. Can a seventy-year old begin a Revolution? The twenty-year old is the revolutionary. He has his life in front of him. That is why we should trust them. We should support the new world. Not this old world. This will become obsolete’, Riad indicates that although he is very critical of the old opposition, these are new young men now who should be given a chance, as they have taken the core of the struggle into their hands. The interview with Riad is interspersed with mobile phone footage of the demonstrations. Riad is



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determined he will not submit, never unite with someone who betrays or has betrayed the Syrian Revolution. While in hiding in the Old City of Damascus, he is not afraid for his own personal safety because in his view he should have already died in 1959 from torture. That he is still alive, is a bonus. He was eighty-two years old at the time of the film. He stood up to Hafez al-Assad and Bashar al-Assad because the society was silent, now the society is not silent anymore, so in his view, his opinion does not matter so much. Riad mentions how the worst of the regime has now surfaced, the torture of children from Dera’a, images he still sees in his dreams. Ali puts Riad al-Turk in direct contact through Skype with Elias Khoury, a Lebanese writer who wrote an article about Riad al-Turk as being the father of the Syrian Revolution. He urges Riad to issue a statement from time to time since the Syrian opposition needs a figure to rally around. Another film by Ali is Waiting for Abu Zeid of which Ali himself says it is his best film.128 It is about a twentieth-century reformist Egyptian philosopher on Islamic thought. The Muslim brotherhood took him to court to divorce his wife after which he went to Leiden University. Abu Zeid questioned the divinity of the Quran. Ali thought that this film would give him the right answer because he used to idealize Abu Zeid. He followed him in his interaction in everyday life, debating and discussing with the media. There were constant tensions behind the scenes. The film was six years in the making with a lot of crises. Abu Zeid died one month before the first screening in 2010. The last documentary film directed by Ali and Ziad al-Homsi is Our Terrible Country. Searching for a spiritual and intellectual father and the role of a fatherlike figure is a central theme in all of Ali al-Atassi’s films. This time the role is taken up by the Syrian leftist writer and intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh, also called the conscience of the Syrian Revolution. Living in Damascus, Yassin was a well-known writer, but his face was not so well known; however, to be sure he could write his opposition books and article in peace he packed his bags on 30 March 2011 to live in seclusion for an indefinite period.129 Eventually, in 2013, Yassin joined his wife who was living and working in the opposition-controlled suburb of Douma. Ali was a long-time friend of Yassin and had been in touch with young Syrian activist and film-maker Ziad al-Homsi who had participated in a video-production training event in Beirut organized by Ali. Ziad started to film and follow Yassin, from the time in Douma. Ali says about the film, The film I made about Yassin al-Haj Saleh is again something dear to my heart as a son of a father who was jailed when I was three and who has been most physically absent from my life. The Syrian dissident Yassin al-Haj Saleh, like

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Documenting Syria: Film-making, Video Activism and Revolution Riad al-Turk, also was incarcerated in Assad’s prisons for a long part (16 years) of his life. In the film, he functions as a father figure for the cinematographer and director Ziad al-Homsi. Syria is going through a historical transformation in society and questions also the figure of the father. Patriarchy and anti-patriarchy are major elements of the Syrian revolution. Some women are taking off their hijab, the fear for the patriarch is broken and there are small revolutions inside of families, questioning patriarchal society.130

At the time of filming, Ziad’s own father is imprisoned, so he shares this sentiment with Ali; he is also searching for a spiritual father.131 Ziad sends the material to Ali who noticed that a strong dynamic connection is emerging between Ziad and Yassin, bridging the young and old generation of revolutionaries for the Syrian opposition.132 Ali is deeply aware that the hope of a revolution against the patriarchy, even at the household level, is something of a utopian vision of the Syrian Revolution. In Our Terrible Country, which starts in the Damascene working-class suburb of Douma, we see Yassin al-Haj Saleh and his wife Amira active in a streetcleaning activity together with Razan Zaitouneh, a young Syrian human rights lawyer. Both women do not wear a hijab. The sequence is intersected by a street interview of one of the inhabitants and revolutionaries of Douma who states that all women in Douma should wear hijab and if they want to be like them, Amira and Razan should cover their hair.133 Al-Homsi follows Yassin on his trip to the north, to Raqqa, his place of birth, where ISIS had just taken over control. In Raqqa, Ali al-Atassi joins them in the production crew. In Raqqa, Yassin learns that his brother Firas has been kidnapped by Da’esh, a fate that eventually also Ziad al-Homsi has to bear. The crew took great personal risks in the filming of this part of the film. ‘In 2013 I was in Raqqa, to shoot with Yassin and Ziad. Da’esh was not completely in control yet. The big question of the middle class was whether to stay or to leave. Education was a big issue. In September 2013, the regime hit the schools in Raqqa. Families were forced to leave. Da’esh took over the schools and used them as brainwashing machines. Da’esh could take control and root in these areas because of local collaborators. We were there to use the camera as a weapon, this camera and its art can play a different role, it will be an archive of the past.’134 Central to the film is the exploration of the relationship between Yassin and Ziad, contemplating whether they should stay for the revolution or exit the country to continue their work from abroad.135 Eventually Yassin, Ziad and the crew decide to leave Raqqa for Turkey, where Yassin arrives in Istanbul in 2013. In a touching sequence, shot in the Istanbul



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metro, Ali shows how Yassin is suddenly a man out of place, struggling to understand how the metro ticket functions. At the same time, he has learned the devastating news that his wife Amira, who was still in Douma, was kidnapped with her three co-workers. The emotional and very personal reaction of Yassin, has not made it to the final cut of the film, for Ali this was too intimate, he left it on the cutting room floor.136 The final scene of the film, situated in a Turkish restaurant, was also shot in the last week of filming in Istanbul and captures the dimension between Ziad, looking for a spiritual father of the Revolution and Yassin, reluctantly making clear that the future belongs to the youth. They exchange stories about their mutually shared experience of family members being kidnapped or imprisoned and finally both break down realizing they have lost the beautiful revolution to the Islamists.137 Unlike Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait (2014), this film by Ziad al-Homsi and Ali al-Atassi shows little to no blood or gory imagery of the Syrian Revolution. Throughout the road movie, we see the utter destruction and devastation inflicted by the Syrian regime bombardments, but the bloody casualties, body parts and other extremely graphic images are purposefully left out of the film. For Ali, the most important part was to tell through the narration of the relationship between these two men, the horrific personal consequences without showing actual blood and body parts.138 This human and deeply moving dimension of the film’s story, makes Our Terrible Country an important document of documentary cinema of the Syrian Revolution. Throughout the film, the discussion about the use of violence is recurring, where Ziad, who has fought with the FSA, personifies the youth rebel while Yassin is the old revolutionary intellectual who will not contemplate taking up arms. But in the Syrian Revolution and the course it had taken, a lot of young people lost trust and hope and became more radical. Including Ziad al-Homsi himself, who decided to return to Syria, after the film recordings and joined an Islamist military faction, called Ahrar al-Sham. He subsequently distanced himself from the film and uploaded his version of the end of the film on YouTube in an epilogue.139 In this reaction, he is specifically concerned to denounce that any Islamist faction is proven to have kidnapped the Douma Four, of which Samira, Yassin’s wife, was part. Until 2017, Ziad distanced himself entirely from the film as he declared that he is not connected to the film anymore and that he rethought of himself for the sake of Allah. Ali confided in me that he was very upset with the radicalization that Ziad had undergone, out of desperation, and he hoped Ziad would one day come back from that place.140 Ali took the opportunity to document Riad al-Turk’s life in hiding in Damascus in 2011 and Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s flight from Syria to Turkey in 2013, two major

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intellectual fatherlike figures for the Syrian Revolution. But besides being a filmmaker himself, Ali al-Atassi was instrumental in the founding and establishment of the non-profit production house Bidayyat in Beirut during 2012 and 2013. It started as Kayani WebTV in 2012, providing an anonymous web platform for short video uploads from Syria, for example, Abdullah Hakawati’s ‘Freedom Song Girl’, and a statement by Yassin al-Haj Saleh from his hiding place in Damascus when he won the prestigious Prince Claus Award for Freedom.141 Ali managed to raise initial funds from Swiss, Norwegian and Dutch organizations to be able to give a voice to younger-generation Syrian film-makers. He recalls, Bidayyat started in 2012. With a couple of other filmmakers in Beirut, we thought it was important to create the platform to emerging young artists. There is no cinema school in Syria. And at the same time documentary became very important. So Bidayyat is set up to create and train emerging Syrian filmmakers. To create artistic and authored film, objectivity is not important to us we are interested in the point of view. The grants allow young people to take their first step.142   The second objective is in-house production. We are in the historical moment and we should do cinema and not reportage. We bring to life the films and send it to the festivals for distribution. Syria is becoming in the middle of the focus of the world’s attention. For us objectivity is not important but ethics are. I don’t think that we are neutral. We are involved from the beginning of the revolution and we want to share our point of view. We try to question ourselves. It is more of a creative journey. Reality is beyond any imagination. Syria is now a sexy topic for the international news industry. Since 2012, we experienced a crucial moment and to us we can’t stay and wait. We have a role to play as a filmmaker to bring Syrian art in the middle. There are a couple of new films coming out that are extremely interesting from an artistic point of view and they should have commercial priority.   The most important target audiences for us are the Syrians. Half of our society is now displaced. We have existential questions about what it is like to be Syrian. In this moment, culture and arts in general play a major role. We try to give a collective representation of what it means to be Syrian. The Syrians are split. We should use music, film, literature, theatre and documentary to bring Syrians back together again based on our values and sense of belonging. How can we live again together? How do we deal with the past with the violence? How do we allow the other to share and understand your point of view? We have films online and an audiovisual archive that allows Syrians to understand history.   Secondly, there is a misunderstanding about Syria. So for us the films play an important role to offer a different visibility against stereotypes, the ones that the



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mass media narratives give about Syria. So a foreign audience is also important for us. Thirdly we believe in the universal values of art, the beauty of mutual respect. To remind ourselves as Syrian people that we have common values to share.   The main challenge that we have is financing. A lot of countries have cuts in the budget and for refugees, security is more important than art. I do think culture has a role to play in peace building and transformation, to help integration and acceptance of these Syrians. (Ali al-Atassi, 2016)143

Bidayyat has grown into an important platform for young Syrian documentary film-makers, giving out production and post-production grants for short films, which are uploaded and distributed on the Bidayyat website, and feature films that are given distribution support to international film festivals and co-producers. Based in Beirut, the organization supports any Syrian documentary film-maker who is doing a first feature film and applies with a strong story related to Syria. They also organize workshop and training for capacity building of the young Syrian film-makers. These workshops are held on locations like Beirut and Istanbul but also online with Syrian film-makers inside Syria and in Jordan and Germany. Successful films were awarded prizes at major international film festivals, such as 300 Miles (2016) by Orwa Mokdad, Coma (2015) by Sara Fatahi, who became selected as a Berlinale Talent in 2017, Houses without Doors (2016) by Avo Kaprealian and The Taste of Cement (2017) by Ziad Kalthoum, who most recently was lauded and awarded at major international film festivals. The organization Bidayyat sprang from the need after the Syrian uprisings but prior to 2011, a young generation of Syrian documentary film-makers benefited from the support of the Arabic Institute of Film founded by Omar Amiralay and Kais al-Zubaidi in Amman and later transformed into the Screen Institute Beirut in Lebanon. The AIF supported the young generation of film-makers that emerged after the digital video revolution in 2000, after the era of cinema masters in Syrian documentary film. Young and talented film-makers like Rami Farrah, Reem Ali, Nidal Hassan and Hazem al-Hamwi were among the first to enjoy support from the AIF. The next chapter will focus on this generation of young Syrian documentary film-makers.

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Inspired by the masters, a new generation

We are hopeful because there is a new generation of filmmakers who not only defend the singularity and subjectivity of their cinema stubbornly, but also they are keen on safeguarding the independence of their vision and productions. They are charged with energy and passion for cinema. Once again, the horizon of possibilities seems open again.1 Omar Amiralay (Salti, 2008) The future of cinematography belongs to a new race of young solitaries, who will shoot films by putting their last penny into it and not let themselves be taken in by the material routines of the trade. Robert Bresson, as quoted by Ammar al-Beik in his autobiographical film Aspirin and a Bullet (2011)

Introduction When Omar Amiralay left Syria to live in exile in France, he stayed strongly connected to Syria through his documentary films, and by the end of the 1990s he spent a majority of his time living in Damascus. Until the end of the 1990s, he had been the only Syrian film-maker who worked exclusively on documentary film-making. The ‘Golden Age of Syrian Cinema’ took place in the 1970s with experimental cinema, and it was a fantastic and exciting time. The energy of the Syrian film-makers of that time was unparalleled. Despite the continuous harassment and corruption of the Syrian National Film Organization (NFO), film-makers were able to experiment, to receive a monthly salary and have access to the latest and the best equipment to make their films. They were able to spend a long time on the production. The irony of course was that after the films were made, many would be shelved and condemned to death by the NFO

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by not being able to be distributed inside Syria.2 In some ironic twist, some films were allowed to be screened at Cannes, win international festival prizes, get international recognition, but not allowed to be screened for Syrian audiences. The fall of the Soviet Union caused a major crisis in film education for young Syrian film-makers. Whereas before, Syrian film-makers went to Moscow for their education, since 1989 the ties with the Soviet Union have been broken and Syrian film-makers had to find their education in other places. Syria does not have a film school, so some were self-taught, others looked abroad, but the NFO scholarship became difficult to receive. The deep corruption and dictatorial regime of the NFO stifled any development of young talent if they did not tow the line of the Syrian government. A new political era started with the Damascus Spring in 2000. Amiralay was one of the signatories of the ‘Statement of 99’, a significant declaration from civil society, published in Al Hayyat newspaper on 27 September 2000 and calling for major reforms and signed by dignitaries from Syrian civil society.3 Developments in the Arab media landscape, digital technology and the emergence of highend video cameras at the start of the twenty-first century enabled young Arab film-makers to develop independent documentary film-making, to bring their point of view to a wider audience. They did not need large crews or budgets to make their films. Many took up the challenge to start shooting their own films. Amiralay saw these developments as a reaction to the common portrayal of the Arab world as a world of death and war. He felt the need to support this new young generation of Arab film-makers. In 2005, also in response to the incompetency of the NFO, Amiralay set up the Arab Institute of Film (AIF) in Amman with support from International Media Support (IMS) in Copenhagen, Denmark, to bolster the independent production of documentary films in the Arab world and provide a strong platform for alternative voices.4 The young film-makers wanted to show another Arab world than the stereotypes in the news media. Who were the names and the people behind the endless body counts coming out of the Arab world? Amiralay said in an interview with Catherine David, Young Arab filmmakers reject the stereotypical images of their everyday lives and their sentiments. They want to offer an alternative to the standard images of death and bodies that can be seen daily on the television . . . it is very normal they want to give a name to those who die, who are these people? . . . documentary film is thus a reaction to the banality of the horrific images of people as mere bodies, to show there was a life behind those bodies . . . death is following us all; in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Palestine and maybe in Syria tomorrow, you can never know.5



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Amiralay saw these developments as a good and important enhancement for Arab documentary film and spent much of his time coaching, motivating and giving guidance to young Arab and Syrian film-makers, who were inspired by him.

Meyar al-Roumi One of the new emerging young Syrian film-makers greatly inspired by Omar Amiralay is Meyar al-Roumi. Born in 1973, Roumi studied film-making at the University of Paris VIII and the prestigious Fondation Européenne pour les Métiers de l’Image et du Sons (FEMIS), where Amiralay had had his education. Roumi made his documentary debut, A Silent Cinema (2001), about the state of Syrian cinema. For this graduation film, he travelled to Damascus with the goal to film inside the NFO. The film starts with a conversation about the status of Syrian cinema production. In the conversation between these two Syrian men, one of them explains that the young film-maker Meyar wants to film inside the NFO to view how it is run, and at the film laboratories. Meyar received authorization to film inside the laboratories of the NFO. There is a long pan towards the portraits on the wall of the president, Hafez al-Assad, and his son Bashar. After two shots inside the NFO building, Meyar begins to tell the story about how he got permission to film there. After that sequence, Meyar visits Syrian film-makers in their homes and interviews them about the process of making a film in Syria. He starts with Ossama Mohammed, who explains that according to the law of word-of-mouth, the public distribution of his films is forbidden. His film can only be watched in cultural clubs, but not publicly. This oral ban has been in place for thirteen years now. The next interview is an arak-fuelled one with Syrian poet and writer Hakam al-Baba, who explains that there are films in Syria but no cinema. The other interviewee is a film-maker, Riyad Shayya, who explains that in Syria a filmmaker can make maybe two films in his whole life. For him, the best film-maker in history is the French artist Bresson, who also features as an inspirational source in Ammar Beik’s film Aspirin and a Bullet (2011). In Syria, Riyad and Hakam tell Meyar that a film-maker is like a farmer who gets subsidies to make potatoes, but nobody eats the potatoes, so they end up in a cave. The problem is with this cave. It kills the potatoes. In the next sequence, Roumi films inside the NFO at the film archive inside a projection room. He provides a rare view into the NFO building and

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its 35-mm archive. Roumi has now arrived in the cave. He turns back to the arak-fuelled interview with Syrian dissident journalist Hakam al-Baba, who famously said in one of his 2006 articles that the Syrian media tries to keep Syrians away from any information that would remind them that they have a brain.6 Hakam explains to Meyar that Syrian directors like Riyad Shayya made one film, Mohammed Malas made two, Ossama Mohammed made one. Samir Zikra also made one. The NFO has set itself as goal to kill the life of them. Hakam explains, ‘In any other country, these people would have made ten or fifteen films by now . . . but here the NFO kills cinema because they are afraid for revolt.’ The next sequence is filmed with Omar Amiralay at his home. Omar explains that his relationship with the government started with a conflict and remained a conflict. ‘I have no respect for this state, no consideration’, he says. And according to Omar, this state does not present the society nor its potentials or its talents. The state under Assad cannot offer anything to Syrian society, explains Omar. Slowly and delicately the camera follows Omar as he takes out his old camera to show to Meyar. The viewer gets a rare and in-depth insight backstage of Syrian cinema. Omar explains that he learned filming on the streets of Paris and that it is the action of the act that is most important for filming: the film-maker needs to reach the zone of ultimate concentration, and being in the image he describes the transfixed state of cine-trans. The next sequence is archive footage of Omar’s film Everyday Life in a Syrian Village (1974). Meyar picked the most impressive and intense scene of the film, wherein local Sufis take part in a transcendental dance, accompanied with the mystical music of a zikr. In the resultant trance, the most enlightened and clear ideas transpire through the minds of those who are experiencing the trance. Meyar has taken the scene of Omar’s film, symbolizing the core of what it means to make a film, to reach cine-trans. This cine-trans compels the film-maker to want to tell and share the story, to bring it to the people, to the masses. However, in Syria, this is exactly what the film-makers are denied, to share their craft. The final sequences bring the viewer back to the interview with Hakam al-Baba, who says that the killing of the heart of the artist is not only true for cinema but for all of the arts and creative industries. ‘Our life is just dead, we are the living dead. This has been going on for thirty  years’, Hakam explains. The final sequence is a compilation of the projector room at the NFO building. This is the tomb of Syrian cinema. As if Meyar wants to say farewell to the dying cinema. Meyar’s film is the first film by a younger-generation film-maker, and shooting as a one-man band, he did not need an entire crew to make this film.



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Meyar was inspired by the older generation but with this debut puts another, more direct and intimate style of film-making into Syrian documentary film.

Joude Gorani In the spring of 1998, I  had lived a year in Aleppo and spent a lot of my time photographing the city with my beloved Canon reflex camera. A  small group of internationals living in Aleppo and some young urban Syrians came together on Thursdays and sometimes gathered at a photography gallery called Le Pont, run by Syrian photographer Issa Touma. One particular Syrian girl, Joude Gorani, who had just finished high school a couple of years before, was also very fond of photography. Together with Joude, I participated in a short workshop on black-and-white photography and we started wandering around the Old City of Aleppo to take photographs using different lighting conditions. We experimented with exposures, developed our own photographs using chemicals and applied all kinds of techniques in the middle of the warm dark summer nights to create the most artistic photographs, which would then go up into an exhibition at the gallery. It was a time of exploration and a certain kind of artistic freedom. The poetry of the Old City of Aleppo and its diversity of people, the warm light, the noise and the incredible overwhelming feeling of being in a city that is over five thousand years old, gave us inspiration. Joude came from a well-known Aleppian family that was well connected. After some time, Joude had found her path and left for France to study film in 1999, on a scholarship granted by the NFO. It was only after years that we would meet again in Damascus. By then she was a recognized and lauded Syrian cinematographer who worked with all the names in the Syrian cinema industry and on her way to become Syria’s youngest and first female director of photography (DOP). But we always kept the bond of that period of wandering through the souks of Aleppo, searching for the best light for a photograph, sharing our passion for the visual and photography. When Joude returned to Syria, she began working as a cinematographer and was employed as a DOP for different film-makers. She moved on to feature fiction films, shooting short productions in collaboration with young film-makers like Suwar Zirkly, followed by long films with Nidal al-Dibs, Maher Kadu, Joud Said and Abdellatif Abdelhamid. She then also collaborated with Mohammed Malas and Ossama Mohammed. Her main work was in fiction drama, but she has greatly contributed to Syrian documentary film with her stunning and

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talented cinematography. It is not because she is my good friend, but I would say Joude Gorani is one of the best cinematographers and DOPs from Syria. She was also the first and only woman who had reached this level and had so many productions on her name as DOP. This was a revolution in itself. Joude explains how she started in cinematography after her entry into still black-and-white photography with our small group of friends in Aleppo: Ossama Mohammed and Omar Amiralay were friends with my mother in Damascus. I met with them when I was visiting my mother and I was inspired to do cinema. It was difficult to watch films in Syria at that time in 1997 and 1998. I went to the Damascus Film Festival, where they were screening fiction. The Damascus Film Festival was much better at that time. Documentary was really difficult in Syria, even to get people to open up in front of the camera, this was a kind of taboo. Documentary seemed really inaccessible as a genre. So for my first attempts to do some filming, I borrowed a VHS camera from Damascus. My documentary interest came really with the new digital technology, when it seemed possible to make films without the need for a lot of money. In this way we could make film, without authorization from the NFO, to avoid their censorship. I went to study in Paris in 1999, I studied two years at University in Paris and four years film school in cinematography, at Le Fémis. The costs of education were my main challenge, because my parents could not pay for it, so I  had to have a scholarship to pay for everything. I  had received a scholarship from the National Film Organization in Syria. I  was among five young Syrians who received the Syrian government scholarship. But I was one of the few who came back because many stayed abroad, everybody went to a different place. Many went to Russia and Armenia. I  was the only one who went to France because I  spoke French. I  was also the only female cinematographer who came back to Syria. The French government gave me an additional scholarship. French film school covered my daily costs, and I filmed my graduation film Before Vanishing (2005)7 with a really small handycam Panasonic, which was really good for the time. I filmed in Damascus without a crew, it was just me and a sound person. It was quite a nice experience. I followed the river Barada and recorded short stories along the river. Having this small camera, it was easier for people to open up. It was spontaneous and I  posed myself the question how long will the River Barada still last? The spontaneity and cooperation of the people I met was a great and pleasant surprise for me. If you look at the work of Omar Amiralay, it is all set up, scripted and designed. He used a bigger crew and prepared everything, which is a classical approach to cinema. I did not really like this kind of work. I like that spontaneous moment much more.8



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Immediately upon return from France, Joude worked as cinematographer for the Syrian NFO. Because the NFO paid for her scholarship of six years, her employee contract with the NFO was two years for each study year. When she returned to Syria, she was guaranteed monthly pay from the NFO for the next twelve years from 2006. At that time in Syria there was a shortage of cinematographers, and she was the first female cinematographer who had more than enough work. She quickly got a position as a DOP, the youngest around, which raised some eyebrows, but the old cinema masters were quick in taking her under their wings. I was treated as a protégé by them. There was an old generation of filmmakers, with Russian education but they were not like me. The position I had was very good. I  always had the newest camera and the best lighting equipment, so technically it was very good place to develop professionally. Really you could have whatever equipment you wanted, you just had to put it in the truck and take it with you. It was all owned by the NFO and stored in their facilities and I did not have to pay for it whatsoever. We would just submit a script, even if it wasn’t a real script, and the commission would give authorisation. Unlike today where all NFO employees inside Syria are pro-regime, at that time the NFO had some openness and most of us were critical of the regime. Now, all the good people left Syria.9

One of Gorani’s first big projects as a DOP was on the UNICEF-commissioned film Black Stone (2006). This is the first long documentary by the internationally acclaimed Syrian film-maker Nidal al-Dibs, who earlier made short films and long feature drama movies. Nidal al-Dibs was born in 1960 and educated at the VGIK in Moscow, like many of his peers. For this documentary, al-Dibs cooperated closely with the well-known Syrian writer Khaled Khalifa, who was co-producer and writer of the scenario. Research and development was done by Lina al-Abed, who later, with support from Bidayyat, directed the impressive documentary Damascus, My First Kiss (2013). Translation was done by Lina Sinjab, who later became the most important Middle East correspondent at the BBC, covering Syria from Damascus. Initially, the film was commissioned by UNICEF-Syria and when it was ready for distribution, it was censored inside Syria. Black Stone is the name of a poor suburban area in southern Damascus. The film follows four children who collect scrap to sell it to help their families survive. With their horsedriven carts, teenagers Mostafa and Mohammed collect iron, plastic and other discarded items to sell. They are both illiterate and spent time in prison for all kinds of charges, usually minor theft charges that resulted in several months

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of prison. They recount the torture they endured during the prison time. Joude’s camerawork is technically impressive, following the boys on their carts, capturing their life stories while they are doing their work. Mohammed talks about his past and how difficult it was to hold a job, while the camera films him in a front headshot riding the cart. We are given a unique point of view, as if sitting on top of the cart, riding along on the harsh daily life of these children. Mostafa recounts how he was imprisoned several times, once for two months in Qudsiyyah. He also describes the daily abuse his father inflicted upon him. The boys feel so comfortable with the camera, they talk about the most intimate details of their dysfunctional family lives. Mostafa explains that his father almost killed him when he hit him with an electricity cable. He carries on describing the punishment in detail. It prompted him to run away with Mohammed and that is how he ended up in the Souq al-Hal, the local market. While scrap collecting, Mohammed reminisces about his dreams. He wants to become a doctor and live a good life. He loves life, he says. Mostafa, while riding the cart, explains that he has a brain problem, that sometimes he gets angry just like that. The cart-driving scene is accompanied with melancholic piano music. A cross-dissolve brings the viewer to the boys in a swimming pool. The interesting part of the pool scene is an interview with a girl who is there playing with the boys. The fact that Joude is a female cinematographer must have assisted the crew to gain trust from the girl. She is a tomboy and likes to play with the boys from the neighbourhood. Therefore, her father hits her. She carries with her the memory of the brother who died when he was a baby. She cherishes the brother she never had. Showing the photo of him to the camera, she carries close to her heart. His name was Ala’a. The next scene, Mustafa and his companions are waiting for a friend to be released from prison. A Kurdish young man on a horse explains that his brothers are in jail and that as Kurds in Syria they do not exist as human beings. The young men and boys are at the dump, weighing the scrap they collected. The interviews continue, whereby the children are talking about drug abuse, glue sniffing and the men who come to the stable and do unspeakable things. The film is the first film recorded in these extremely poor neighbourhoods, portraying a side of Syria that the regime was adamant to hide from the general public. None of the protagonists in the film has any kind of education; their dream is to go to school and have an education. Joude’s documentary camerawork is excellent. Silently, her observational camera records the daily life and struggle of these children, with respect for the protagonists, without interference. At one point, the boys are having a bit of a



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race with their carts and another boy is running after them. The camera follows, and the boy gets hit. Joude keeps on filming, we see the scene unfold, the boy is assisted, he is then carried away while limping. Through the entire scene the viewer is there, observing the daily life of these boys. During the final scenes, the viewer is taken closer into the intimacy of the household where the boys grew up. An absent father forces them to be the breadwinners of the household. Their dreams, however, are more ambitious, including dreams of being a doctor. A sibling says she wants to be a lawyer so their parents, who do not take care of them and hit them, can be judged. The camera follows the children on the school playground. They describe the abusive situations at the school, where teachers hit pupils on their feet. A ten-yearold girl, Yusra, tells the horrific story about a man who overpowered one of her friends in the school toilets and eventually killed the young girl and cut her head off. Yusra then quit going to school. Her father is in jail because he killed his sister. In the final scene, the boys go on a trip to the city centre of Damascus, in a mini bus. It seems this scene has been staged, or at least arranged by the crew specifically for the film. They visit a street theatre, smoke sisha and drink tea in a café, visit a sleazy cinema and go to a zoo together with a final shot of the boys at the top of Jebl Qassioun, overlooking the city of Damascus. The film is one of the first and most intimately filmed social-interest documentaries in Syria that voices a strong critique towards the insufficient and non-existent government policy to bring any type of development or aid to these neglected areas like Al-Hajar al-Aswad. We are introduced to a world that many or perhaps none of the upscale Damascene urban elite have never encountered. The invisibles, they are called. Nidal al-Dibs managed to get intimate access to these young protagonists. The film, for the first time, exposes the difficult lives of these children at the outskirts of Damascus. The Ministry of Information banned the film eventually. It was not approved through the NFO. There were two roads to get a film or documentary approved, through the NFO or through the State Television Network. The process of obtaining official approval from the NFO for a film project was quite bureaucratic at that time, but it was a lot easier than going through the State Television Network. According to Joude, despite everything, staff at the NFO were politically and artistically more open. The television networks were much more corrupted than the NFO and a lot of the staff were not skilled and only had their jobs because of their friends or relatives. At the beginning of the Syrian Revolution, there was a small vigil organized in front of the Libyan Embassy against Gaddafi.10 Joude thought this was a special and moving moment for her; the demonstrators shouted slogans and

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pretended it was against the regime. Since then the thought started to arise that maybe it was possible to have a revolution in Syria as well. More vigils were organized, there was a gathering in support of political prisoners in front of the Ministry of Justice and this was a watershed moment for Joude. She became hopeful like everyone else. The first year of the Syrian Revolution was for her a year of hope. But then everything changed: ‘Around the summer of the next year, Syria became really a very bad place. Summer 2012, I think. When the regime invaded Homs and Hama, at the beginning of a big crackdown. Army and tanks entered the streets and they started to kill participants of the demonstrations. We expected that it was the beginning of the end. I am not sure what and how I felt that at that moment, but in retrospect I do think we sensed it. The Hama demonstrations were quite something, they were so many and so big and when that stopped it was quite a turning point.’11 Besides her regular NFO work, Joude agreed on filming for other Syrian filmmakers and had to be careful not to raise any suspicion about the people she was filming. She used a small camera and a small crew. She also continued filming with Syrian drama films. One film for which she was the DOP at the time of the Syrian Revolution in 2012 was Mohammed Malas’s Ladder to Damascus (2013). Also, Joude features in Ziad Kalthoum’s impressive documentary Immortal Sergeant (2014), which is situated partly on the set of Ladder to Damascus, where Ziad worked as assistant director. Joude remembers this particular shoot very well. That was a special experience. It was a very small crew. We didn’t have an authorization. With little money we filmed in a small old house. All around Damascus they were bombing the suburbs. They started really bombing heavily. People from our crew were forced to leave their homes. Some were from Hajar Aswad, a very poor area. The situation started to get really dramatic. The shooting was really special and very difficult. We had a sense of weirdness of doing this film. It was a political story, but at the same time a love story with many cheesy moments. For me, it was a good experience because we worked with many different people together and we could see how many people from different regions lived through the events.   It was intense for everybody but since we were really living together day and night as a crew, we lived everybody’s experience in that specific moment in Damascus city. Every morning when we would come to the set, always someone had a new story to tell from Darayya and Al-Hajar al-Aswad. It was so saddening and very painful. Then sometimes we would hear the airplanes coming over and realise we were hearing the bombardments. Everybody from the crew was antiregime, except some of the actors. We all trusted each other. That time, there was



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a sense of freedom that you could talk about everyone. We started talking, the crew members. We talked really, everybody spoke their mind, without fears, it was quite exceptional. At that moment there was a sense of freedom, of course not with taxi drivers, but if you were in a setting of a film set like this there was no big risk. There was a sense that too much was going on to be important. It was only one year. That first year.12

Joude started working in Lebanon at the same time of filming Ladder to Damascus, and a lot of colleagues left. Those who remained were pro-regime. She did not film deep inside opposition areas because that was too dangerous, but she contributed to films like Our Terrible Country (2014), Haunted (2014) and Home (2015). She travelled back and forth between Damascus and Beirut until the end of 2012 and moved out of Syria permanently in 2013. She was never detained or arrested by the authorities. She was only questioned when she had signed a public call from Syrian film-makers in the beginning of the revolution.13 The director of the NFO at the time, Mohammed al-Ahmad, called Joude into his office where he advised her to take off her signature from the call because there was an Israeli film-maker who also had signed the letter. Joude explains, ‘He said he was telling me this to warn me and because he liked me. So I replied that I was not taking off my signature and nothing happened afterwards. Al-Ahmad is now Minister of Culture.’14 Officially, Joude is still employed by the NFO as state employee, as it is impossible to resign from this job, and she did not finish the twelve-year contract yet. She remains currently outside Syria. When she would return, the process to gain authorization from the Ministry of Culture to exit the country again will have become much harder. At the moment we spoke to each other in September 2017, she had no intention to return to Syria any time soon. In ten years, I am afraid to see the future. It seems the regime is going to stay in some form. I am not hopeful for a real democratic change in Syria. It is a very big loss for Syria that most of the young talented and energetic people have left and I hope they can come back to rebuild the country one day. People who are now a teenager in Damascus have very few opportunities to learn from an older generation that was open-minded. A  lot of the open-minded teachers in the drama institute have left. Now everyone is pro-regime. It is going to be very quiet. In 20 years, I hope that Syria would at least be liveable. It is going to take a long time for it to heal, and I hope to manage to stay connected to that. I hope this for my daughter as well, her father is Palestinian, I am Syrian. I hope she will be able to connect with both of her heritages at some point in her life.15

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Rami Farah Another highly talented young film-maker, who was inspired by the old generation is Rami Farah. Born in 1980, Rami Farah is a Syrian director and theatrical performer. He pursued studies in performance arts at the Higher Institute of Drama and Arts in Damascus, and in documentary film-making at the Arab Film Institute in Amman, Jordan. His first films were a blend of video art, dance and audiovisual material. In 2001, he directed Zamakan (Space Time), a dialogue between a chair and a fan. With the support of the Arab Institute of Film (AIF) in 2006, Rami directed Silence (2006), a documentary on the Syrian-Israeli conflict of 1967. This film won the Golden Falcon award at the Rotterdam Arab Film Festival. In 2008, Rami received the Transmedia Award at the Manifesto Festival of Berlin for his work Not a Matter of If but When (2008) and Epic (2008), a series of monologues on peace, animosity, hatred, vengeance and transcendence. His training as a dancer adds a unique style to the rhythm and movement in his film-making. Silence follows two Syrian men from the Golan Heights, Rami’s birthplace. The film explores their memories of the Israeli occupation in 1967. They are preserving their memories in various ways, hoping that one day they will return. One is an old man who remembers in detail how the battle of 1967 was fought and the other works with Syrian state television to air programmes focused on the people from the Golan Heights. The elderly man from Quneitra is deeply bitter about how the Syrian government army abandoned the people. He states that Quneitra was actually occupied by Israel four days after the announcement by the president that Quneitra had been occupied. Everybody fled, ‘like ants’, the Syrian Army fled, the people fled because they were afraid. The Israeli Army did not expel anyone, they had already fled. The Israeli Army told the civilians to stay in their houses and raise the white flag. The battle for Quneitra started with a massive onslaught of tanks and warplanes. ‘It was a tremendous battle’, the old man says. The other man, who stands next to the shouting fence, overlooking Israeli-occupied Majdal Shams, says the people of Majdal Shams resisted and wanted to fight back, but the Syrian Army withdrew. The civilians were powerless against the military might of the Israeli Army. The Syrian Army fled and left civilians to their own devices. The next sequence is filmed at the shouting fence. At that time, the internet was sporadic and certainly there was no opportunity to communicate electronically as social media and Skype did not exist. Telephone conversations were not possible so the only way of communicating was through the use of megaphones



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at the so-called shouting fence. The producer of the TV programme shouts for his nephew and eventually there is a shouting conversation between him and the family members on the other side. Rami’s camera has patiently waited for this to happen and records an event which is surreal, a conversation between two family members who have not seen each other since thirty years, and who probably will never see each other in their lifetimes. Small figures in a wide shot on the other side of the valley are his nephew and his sister. He can only see some of his sister’s face using a binocular. The man learns that his cousin passed away. He knew her and cannot even pay his respects or visit his family. The absurd situation at the Golan Heights where families are split since decades and the nearness yet distance of the two family members is striking. The intolerable situation of being deprived from being able to see your closest family is expressed in these images. Rami’s film Silence was banned in Syria because of the critical voices against the Syrian Army and how the civilians were abandoned by the army. Rami continued making critical art, either through animation, theatre or performance art. During the revolutionary protests, the artists’ scene was expected to choose the side of the people in the streets, which most of them did but also all of them refused the violence. The regime tried to portray the revolutionaries as violent people to justify the state violence, and here, Rami sees a role for the artists of his generation who grew up submerged in Ba’athist ideology, to show that the Syrian Revolution is not how the Assad regime wants to portray it, to justify its crackdown and violence.16 Rami moved to Paris in November 2011 when he had the opportunity. He felt guilty in the beginning because he left behind family, but eventually he sees his role as an artist to continue the revolution. Many of his friends died as camera activists, he explains to Jonas Hjort in an interview with Louisiana Art Channel. They were just filming as peaceful resistance, to document the reality, to show what is going on at the ground, and they got killed for it.17 Rami is currently working on a film with Fares Helou entitled A Comedian in a Syrian Tragedy (2018), a co-production between Shashat Multimedia productions (Jordan), Final Cut for Real (Denmark) and OSOR (France). The film tells the story of the famous Syrian actor Fares Helou, one of the first Syrian celebrities to take a public stand against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. He participated in demonstrations in Damascus and elsewhere. Accordingly, he received death threats and indirect threats from the authorities. Because Fares is a famous person, the regime was careful not to arrest him immediately but instead tries to convince Fares to ‘come back to his senses’. Rami started to film with Helou from the very first demonstration he attended and follows

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him continuously. The film, which is beautifully shot, gives an intimate insight into the life of this famous comedy actor. It also shows how the regime tried to influence celebrities to come on their side. In one particular scene we see Helou on a rooftop, after he had attended a demonstration. He is dressed in casual shorts and a shirt and sits on a plastic chair reflecting on the situation in Syria. Rami films Helou while he receives a phone call in the middle of the conversation. It is a regime agent, and clearly someone that knows Helou very well. The conversation starts very friendly, but gradually through the conversation you get the feeling there is something very dark behind this. The agent goes from a very friendly tone, trying to convince the actor to come back to the regime so that he can have a good life, and he will be praised, then changes to a darker tone, indirectly threatening Helou if he continues attending demonstrations. At the end of the conversation it is very clear that if Helou continues his activities, he will be in mortal danger. It is like a dark conversation from a Godfather episode. Helou’s life is in the balance. Helou puts down the phone and looks at the camera. As if to show the viewer how they are dealing with people like him. The blackmailing of the regime to convince well-known Syrians to propagandize for the Assads is not uncommon, but what is special in this particular scene is intimate documentation of this kind of psychological oppression. In the next scene, we see the regime’s repercussions. Helou’s resolve to demonstrate is only getting stronger. He sees himself as having started the Syrian revolution all by himself. He has found his role. He feels he is crucial in leading the demonstrations, his celebrity status helps the protesters. His role, however, is cut short after he and his family members receive multiple threats. After a visit from the secret police, Helou’s ‘Al Bustan’, an art centre that he established as a free space for artists of all kinds in a suburb of Damascus, is completely destroyed, looted and damaged by the regime. Devastated, Helou walks through the destroyed and looted rooms. The threats by the regime are clear. Helou leaves for France. Rami follows him to France, as well as his wife and children. Assuming the revolution will be over soon and lead to a success, they see their time in France as temporary. From his apartment in France, Helou is still communicating with activists on the ground, through Facebook, keeping up to date with the activities and demonstrations in Syria. It becomes clear that the Syrian Revolution will become a protracted conflict. Both Rami and Helou do not have a prescription for this life in exile. Rami continues filming Helou who now suddenly is one of the many refugees in France and no longer that famous actor. He falls into depression. Rami managed to capture the most intimate moments in Helou’s



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life and it shows the deep and close relationship between the director and the protagonist. In beautifully shot scenes, we get to know Helou the person, not the comedian. However, Rami also manages to refer to the legacy of Helou, by his well-constructed cinematography and the manner in which he brings Helou in the picture. Helou the person is open, amicable and instantly will draw the viewer compassionately into his world. Those who know Helou the actor from his comedy films will have difficulty not to laugh in certain scenes, even though the scene may carry a deep tragic background. In one scene, for example, shot in Paris, we see Helou sitting in his kitchen together with his wife, during a French lesson. At the same time, Helou is checking his social media on his laptop. The way the scene is shot, the response of Helou to the French lesson and his distracted reactions because he feels the revolution in Syria is much more important than a boring French lesson, could resemble a typical scene in one of Helou’s comedy films. The film is in post-production and not yet available for public screening. In 2016, the film received post-production funding from the Doha Film Institute in Qatar. In 2017, the project received funding from the IDFA Bertha Fund and the film is slated to be screened on festivals in 2019.18 Besides his film about Fares Helou, Rami has been working with a great team of filmmakers, artists, musicians, researchers, activists and archivists on On Screen Off Record  – a documentary film that tells the story of the Syrian Revolution as depicted by five citizen activists from the city of Dara’a. This film is also in production. Rami Farah recently married Palestinian journalist Lyana Saleh, who made the impressive television documentary La Rebelle de Raqqa for France24 about a female anti-regime activist in Raqqa who bravely filmed inside Da’esh-occupied Raqqa.19

Reem Ali The AIF in Amman selected many talented young Arab and Syrian film-makers to support them in their first steps into the documentary and film industry. One of them was female director Reem Ali, a young actress who studied at the Higher Institute of Arts in Damascus. She was one of the last Syrian female film-makers trained by Omar Amiralay. Her documentary debut was the tremendously brave film called Foam (2006). The film centres on a young man with schizophrenia, Mohammed, whose sister Asmahan and her husband Ali were communists in the 1970s, incarcerated and met in prison.20 They still face prosecution so are contemplating leaving Syria to immigrate to Canada. The film brilliantly and

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indirectly criticizes the Assad regime through the stories and experiences of the communist couple and the innocent remarks from Mohammed. Asmahan is in paralysis about the past, but Mohammed does the talking for her, explaining how she was arrested and what she was doing during prison. The past dissidence of the couple, their crushed illusions for a better future in Syria, radiate through the story, articulated through the innocence of a mentally disabled brother. The numerous creative dissident activities by young Syrians in 2011 did not come from nowhere. This film is a good example of the build-up to the outpouring of artistic dissidence at the start of the Syrian uprisings. Stefanie van der Peer explains that the artistic dissidence of the Syrian Revolution has its roots in the plentiful creative resistance that was already developing with films like Foam. Reem Ali’s 2008 documentary Zabad shows that negotiations with dissidence and political repression take place on many different levels, and that the uprisings are not only due to sudden changes leading to ‘democratic’ sensibilities in reaction to contextual factors and enabled through neighbouring practices. In fact, artistic dissidence comes as a consequence of numerous dissident activities that have already been reacting to years of institutional and social repression. (van de Peer, 2012)21

The film opens with a shot of a staircase in a typical Syrian building of flats. We are introduced to one of the protagonists who is handing out food plates to his sister Asmahan. He is leaving for a shave. The title comes up on screen. The protagonist of the film is Mohammed, he is mentally ill. From the brief scene, where he interacts with his family and the answer he gives about a dream he had, it is quite clear that he is mentally ill. He introduces his name: Mohammed Yassin Majariso. He is a shabby-looking middle-aged man, who slumps a bit while walking. He talks about his father; he says that his father was a good man but he wanted to burn the house down with all his kids in the room. He also hit his wife in front of the children. He would get angry in front of his siblings. His sister would say, he’s going to take gas and burn us. He also recounts how he himself had been beaten by his dad and his friends in the house. The obvious manner in which Mohammed speaks draws the viewer into the story. By his unfazed honesty, Mohammed delivers a damming critique of Syrian society. Mohammed lives with his sister. He sits down in the corridor, and she tells him to go and take a bath because he smells so foul. He refuses and says he will take a bath tomorrow and will sit outside so she does not smell him.



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In the following scene Mohammed stares in front of him in his room, he is looking outside. Mohammed explains that his father always took him to the clinic for his pills. He needs two sets of pills. The viewer at this moment gets an intimate insight into the family and Mohammed’s role and place in it. He reminisces about his dad who was always going to fish in the sea. The next scene brings us back to the corridor at the bottom of the staircase, the same location and shot of the opening scene. In this manner, the viewer has a respectful distance of a daily family scene. Mohammed’s sister calls him to take his breakfast and his pills. He takes his pills and stands outside while he receives his breakfast and walks back upstairs. He invites the cinematographer to come up with him and have breakfast. In a parallel montage, we see Mohammed with his sister who reads Mohammed’s horoscope together with her husband. The camera is again at a respectful distance, yet we get introduced to a very intimate surrounding. In this particular scene the compassion and love that his sister and relatives have for Mohammed is evident. His sister Asmahan asks him about school and a particular teacher. It emerges that Mohammed was also severely abused at school. The teacher would hit his hands to make them bleed. He would slam his head against the board, would hit his hands with a stick if Mohammed did not answer the questions fast enough. His sister reacts not on the abuse of the teacher but on whether her brother forgot the question through God, so it would be God’s fault then. In another scene Mohammed is searching for a foreign channel on the radio. The scenes are intersected with the washing machine that is doing his laundry symbolizing the repetition of daily life, hence the title Foam. Mohammed talks about his sister and to which school she went. He recounts an incident where the Syrian security police were looking for his sister Asmahan. He opened the door and asked them why they were there, they said they wanted his sister. He recounts that he closed the door in front of them; ‘I locked the door. What should I do? Look at them?’ Then the patrol left. The next day, his sister went to prison. ‘Just like this they took her because she was a communist. What was she, political or communist?’ Mohammed asks his sister herself. ‘A communist’ his sister replies. ‘Yes, she was a communist, that’s why she went to prison’, Mohammed explains. His brutal honesty again is the major dissident vehicle of this film. He tells the camera that his father told him not to talk about it, to just forget it. His father said, ‘Your sister is gone and it’s over. The patrol took her. God will take care of it.’ This scene is followed by a close-up of a little book, which says ‘freedom of opinion’. Mohammed explained if you were communist, they can arrest you just like that at school. Not at home, they took his sister from school.

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He repeats, ‘they took my sister to prison.’ It was a big event in Mohammed’s life. Mohammed says that he is not sure whether they took Ali, his brother-in-law, as well. Then the film cuts to a close-up of Ali, who recounts his time in prison together with his wife Asmahan. In an intimate close-up, Asmahan recounts how she could see torture taking place through the doors. In prison, she had a nightmare about her late mother. She was at the neighbours in a house with a low ceiling, there was commotion, it was crowded everybody ran, and her mother fell on the ground. People stepped on her. She began to scream and then Asmahan woke up. Upon hearing the scream, the prison guard took her outside to get some air. But Asmahan explains, there is no air, it is just prison oxygen. Ali chips in and recounts his visits to prison and says that one of the mukhabarat gave him some sweets and chocolate. Unfazed innocence seems to give even the secret police a pass. Mohammed’s sister was in prison for two years, and she tells him it is good he knows what politics means and what a communist is. A reflective shot of the turning washing machine and Asmahan smoking a cigarette, contemplating the past. A new scene and chapter introduces the graves of Mohammed’s mother and her family members. Mohammed barely remembers where his mother’s grave is. He says they gave her a shot of something and then the next day, she died. His sister Asmahan explains that her mother wanted to live ten days after the death of her father. But instead she passed away five years before his death. ‘This is justice in life’, she explains. ‘We inherited our father from her. She is free from pain. God damn life, it’s all pain.’ She loves her father no matter what, but he was a heavy burden on them. She was afraid for her mother from him. The deep-seatedness of patriarchal domestic violence, prevalent in many Syrian documentaries, causes even the hardiest seasoned communist activist to rationalize the abuse that her father inflicted on her, her mother and the rest of the family. Asmahan’s husband, Ali, explains the difficult period after his mother-inlaw died and he was left with a sick father-in-law, a disabled brother-in-law, a depressed wife and a young family. There were problems between them. But his wife said there were two phases of her depression, Ali got her into the depression and he got her out of the depression. The couple discuss whether or not to leave the country which is corrupt in everything. Ali explains, ‘What kind of life is this? Wherever you go, you feel like you’re under siege. I’m going to leave here one day, even if I  only have three days left. But I’m not going begging before I leave. We’ll sell the house. But I’m certain of that even if the work is difficult over there. But what I am certain of is there is something called freedom.’



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Filmed from the back of the car, Mohammed’s sister and her husband are on the way to the beach. Mohammed realizes that his sister is leaving the house. He is alone now. He wonders who is going to give him food, he does not even have a refrigerator. Totally alone, he stands on the top floor of the house, looking over the outside. Intersected are images of the beach, where the family is playing on the sandy shore. An over-shoulder shot is taken of a man who watches them, as a constant reminder that this dissident family is being surveilled. Back at the house, Mohammed, the mentally ill protagonist, is looking over a field. In the end, when the film-maker asks Mohammed if he would like to stay in Syria or leave, he starts laughing. The film Foam is a delicate, intimately human and extremely critical documentary film, exposing the daily life of living under the Assad regime through reflection and silent contemplation on the impact dictatorial oppression has on dissidents and their families. The main dilemma in the household is between the urge felt by the dissident couple to leave a place where they cannot express themselves and where they are under constant surveillance and the responsibility they have to take care of the disabled Mohammed who cannot survive without them. Asmahan is not able to reconcile her past, the family she comes from, with the present, the family she built herself. In Stefanie van de Peer’s delicate and thoughtful analysis of the film, she argues that Reem Ali uses the character of Mohammed as a mediator, an enabler for Asmahan’s state of mind, a mind that she is not able to speak, and even though he is disabled, Mohammed provides the vehicle for a critical political voice towards Reem’s inner thoughts. What she is not able to speak, Mohammed does it for her, his heroine, in his straightforwardness and innocence.22 Ultimately, the spectator is left with an open-ended question whether the family will emigrate or not, showing the dilemmas in an exceptional dissident family with which many Syrian families to date can identify.

Ammar al-Beik The collection of films by Ammar al-Beik is an important body of work in the history of Syrian documentary film-making because of its contribution to the high artistic value and Ammar’s exceptional talent as a multimedia artist. Moreover, Ammar is self-taught, having made his first short experimental documentary film in 1996. In Damascus, he visited the father of Syrian cinema, Nazih Shahbandar, who inspired him greatly (see Figure 2.1). Ammar does not

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Figure 2.1  The young Ammar al-Beik with Nazih Shahbandar in 1994. © A. Beik.

confine himself to the medium of film, and he is certainly not restricted to the medium of documentary film. In fact, it is difficult to categorize Ammar. He himself says about it, ‘I don’t agree with the concept, for me documentaries and fiction are so overlapping, I don’t make documentaries in the conventional meaning of the word ‘documentary’; categorizing for me eliminates the meaning of cinematography . . . I am a filmmaker and a visual artist, my artistic work is my



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way of life, I live through it, it’s my lifestyle.’23 Al-Beik is an important creative film-maker from the younger generation of Syrian film-makers that started producing films after the older first generation of documentary film-makers, without any support from the NFO. Mohammed Malas has been a great inspiration for Ammar al-Beik. Al-Beik had a deep friendship with the artistic Syrian couple living in France – filmmaker Hala al-Abdallah and painter Yousef Abdelke. Initially, Ammar wanted to make a film about Yousef Abdelke and his life and art, but he ended up doing most of cinematography and co-directing Hala al-Abdallah’s first own auteur documentary. Typical of Ammar’s experimental documentary films is the initial chaotic start of his films, not necessarily done in chronological order and often in an array of shots and interviews, after which slowly a structure emerges that will grab the viewer’s attention. Often the spectator is taken behind the scenes with Ammar’s film; for example, interviews with other people are included with their preparations before the start of the interview. In his essayist autobiographical work Aspirin and a Bullet, an interview being set up with his mother, who describes her travels to Cyprus where her father owned storage facilities, a café and a cinema. Before the interview starts, the spectator sees how Ammar tries to attach the radio mic on his mom. She snaps at him several times and already much of her temper and character is shown, before the interview had even started. The same technique he applies in the film he made with Hala al-Abdallah in 2006, I Am the One Who Brings Flowers to Her Grave. The first short film that al-Beik filmed in Syria, by himself and self-funded, is entitled Light Harvest (1996). It is a short piece of mesmerizing music combined with poetic and dreamy shots carrying the warm light in the Old City of Damascus. This short essay symbolizes a childhood memory of Ammar. Al-Beik says this about it: This was actually my first film, I made in 1996. Indeed, it was the first poem, I composed of poetic light out of love for the cinema – which was what everyday I  dreamed of doing. The place is a watermill located behind my room in my mother’s house in the Old City of Damascus, in Bab Al Salam, the road parallel to Bab Touma. As a child, its sound taught me one of the most essential lessons I learned about the cinema. The mill was right on the bank of the Barada river . . . I can still hear the rhythm of the grinding mechanism, which exploited the power of the river, and that of the other diesel-powered equipment developed in the fifties in order to complete the grinding process. These days, even though water is scarce in the river, I keep hearing the deep dooom dooom sounds day

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and night, and I wake up when the dooom dooom stops . . . The habit of hearing these sounds is such they have entered my subconscious and settled there. In the early morning on my way to school, these sounds met images, so that an early sight would be the mill workers, receiving new wheat and handing over white gold . . . artisan made flour . . . a very fine dust blowing lightly along with the bustle of workers busy putting down heavy wheat sacks and lifting bags of flour.   The white gold dust was the ‘Light Harvest’ of Syrian workers, who ate what they had planted and reaped . . . a loaf of bread made in my homeland. This film received its first award at the International Biennial of Photography and Visual Arts in Liège, Belgium, in 2000. At the time, the Jury Prize was handed over by the mayor of the city. For me, this was the revelation of my passion for filmmaking. My watermill neighbor, residing in the middle of my tired city, was the first step towards the world. The prize received at the festival was a reward for making independent films with the help of poetry written in light. (Ammar al-Beik, 2012)24

His second film They Were Here (2000) is a well-produced and impressive piece of classical auteur documentary cinema. Working with cross-faded jump cuts, al-Beik places the former workers of a steam locomotive factory. It is a beautiful filmed short, leaving you with a feeling of nostalgia and sadness. ‘We want eggs, milk, soap and detergent’, the sentence written in white chalk on one of the walls of a huge factory for restoring steam locomotives. Located in the city of Damascus, this large space holds countless human stories behind its walls. The film encapsulates the suffering of workers in the developing countries that embraced the industrial revolution but relied on imports only, while manufacturing and development remained non-existent. Certainly, the dictatorial regime under former president Hafez al-Assad did not achieve growth on either count – neither the agricultural revolution nor the industrial revolution. Workers were turned into machines and forced to waste their efforts and energy not for the sake of evolution but to guarantee low performance, due to mismanagement and a lack of organization. Most of the workers in the factory are near the age of retirement and work long hours for wages not exceeding fifty dollars a month. And this is recent – the year 2000, to be exact. For them there is no medical insurance, no pension. Some workers retire with a compensation of less than a thousand dollars after forty  years (or even more) of service at the factory. The factory is now under threat of closure due to the lack of appropriate care and maintenance. The workers are struggling to maintain this space in order to guarantee their



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earnings and to protect it as one of the tangible memories of the city, but to no avail. The political system merely suppresses the workers’ freedom and exploits them, without considering any viable solutions. In the phrases repeated by the workers, many of whom are approaching the end of their working lives, we feel the mutual distress of their words and of the corners of this place. They Were Here is a beautifully shot, warm and empathic short documentary, critical of the governing entities in Syria, who have utterly neglected and failed to bring these men a better future and adhere to their demands for social justice. Al-Beik directed and filmed many other interesting documentaries and artistic video installations highly critical of Syrian governance and society, such as The River of Gold (2002) shot on 16-mm, Boulevard Al Assad (2002), My Ear Can See (2002) and When I Color My Fish (2002). After the introduction of small digital cameras, al-Beik decided to take the tour towards Deir Mar Musa al-Habashi, a small monastery, run by an Italian Jesuit priest that was visited every weekend by young European backpackers, Syrian volunteers and families who wanted to enjoy nature and the old church. Al-Beik explored the monastery of Deir Mar Musa and filmed Clapper (2003), a title to which he later added the sentence Father Paolo Dall’Oglio: The ‘Icon’ of the Syrian Revolution in 2013. At the time, I made the film about Father Paolo because his personality stimulated me, it was that time when almost everyone visiting Damascus made sure to go and visit Deir Mar Musa. Personally I do not like a situation when people get suddenly attracted to something, so I wanted to know what made this such a popular man, I had questions about his personality and his way of doing things, at that time the answer I had was that he had a religious agenda. In 2011, I got a different answer than I was looking for in 2003 when he took his humanitarian stand with the Syrian Revolution. He passed the religion way more to a universal humanitarian target ... I really believe today that the same person who facilitated the presence of this person in Syria is behind his disappearance because he crossed their borders and interfered too much in politics, and because Paolo managed to become very popular across Syria and beyond.25

The film is based on several interviews with key members of the monastic community of Deir Mar Musa in Nebk; Father Paolo and Brother Boutros. Others who are introduced as main characters are Syrian Father Jacques and Swiss Brother Jens. The film portrays the monastic community of Deir Mar Musa al-Habashi, located in a valley in the Syrian desert near the town of Nebk. During the end

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of the 1990s, the monastery had become well known with many adventurous European and American backpackers who had been exploring Syria. Deir Mar Musa also attracted many young Syrian people and their families, as a place to visit. Visitors took the road and the long walk up the mountain to this ancient monastery where Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, Jesuit priest and peace activist, restored Byzantine Frescos of the Ethiopian Monk who used this place as a spiritual retreat. The monastic community was led by Father Paolo, who saw it as his mission to bring together Muslims and Christians in the faith of the book. The community aspired to live as one with nature, with the natural surroundings, one of the most important aspects of everyday life in the monastic community of Deir Mar Musa. Al-Beik interviews several members of this community among whom is the Italian Father who is the main protagonist of the film. But a good part of the film is an interview in the monastery’s library with brother Boutros, a monastic community member who hails from the northeast of Syria, al-Hassakah. His task at the monastery is to herd the goats and produce cheese. In the interview, which is recorded in the monastery’s small library, the viewer can wonder if this man had no more ambitions in life. In fact, that is a question the director had been asking throughout the film. Along these lines, it is clear that brother Boutros has absolute faith and acceptance of the task he is given. The deep respect for Father Paolo as a monastic leader and the dedication of the community members are revealed in the interview. There are several other interviews with people who work the land of the monastery. The film title, Clapper, can be derived from cuts in between the interviews and footage from everyday life at the community. The interviewees’ talking head shots are cheesily superimposed on a graphic clapperboard. It makes the films slightly tacky, but it seems al-Beik prefers these transitions between scenes. In his later film Aspirin and a Bullet, he uses a similar technique but then with a shot of an old television. Al-Beik interviews Father Paolo at several locations in the monastery. The film was shot in 2001, when Pope John II visited Damascus, and Father Paolo was heavily involved in the preparations for this visit. In the film, al-Beik follows Father Paolo in his daily activities arranging the visit of the Pope and giving leadership to Deir Mar Musa. The centre of activity is one scene inside the telephone and computer room at the monastery. Sometimes, the interview is interrupted by a telephone call, which al-Beik also records, giving insight into the manner and energy of the Jesuit priest. Through the use of solar power,



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the monastery managed to get electricity for their computers. Using this new technology was not in contradiction to the conviction of a sober lifestyle as a Jesuit monk, according to Paolo, ‘we need to be in the world and communicate with people and this helps us.’ Some of the imagery in this film is extremely poetic and beautifully composed, also thanks to the dramatic setting of the monastery in the Syrian desert where the daily prayers take place inside the old Byzantine church with exquisite restored frescoes. The camera pans during the mass, when visitors and guests watch or pray. All the monastic members sit on tapestries on the ground, at their fixed places, in front of them a Bible, and Father Paolo leads the singing. Natural light comes in through small windows high in the church, giving the scene a soft and warm atmosphere; the other source of luminance is the candle. A beautifully framed shot of Father Paolo from behind during prayers, his arms wide spread, ready to receive the Holy Spirit, gives the priests a dreamlike, spiritual character. On the other hand, the priest is also a very down-to-earth character, when he is filmed just after he wakes up in his sleeping quarters, on his balcony, noting to al-Beik that he is up very early. Al-Beik is full of admiration for the priest and calls Father Paolo the icon of the Syrian Revolution. Father Paolo is the one who once said, ‘Our hearts and souls shiver at the barbaric assault that President Bashar al-Assad and his army have led on Syria, its landmarks, heritage and relics. Why do you grieve when shells hit the Umayyad Mosque? Where’s the problem? We have the old maps and plans; and we will rebuild and restore it once the regime falls. The most important thing is that the dictator leaves; the rest is easy.’26 But this icon of the revolution, who took part in all opposition activities that served the Syrian people during the crisis, suddenly became a foreigner and stranger to the Syrian regime. The film by al-Beik is thus interesting because it documents someone who played an important role in the uprisings. Father Paolo led several protests and expressed vocal support for the Syrian opposition. The Assad regime became suspicious and falsely accused Deir Mar Musa and in particular its leader, of hiding weapons. Consequently, the Italian father was ousted from Syria, where he had lived since the beginning of the 1980s. After he was exiled from Syria, Father Paolo, gave a lot of interviews to Western news outlets. Eventually, he decided to go back into Syria. By this time ISIS had taken hold of Raqqa, and he tried to negotiate the release of prisoners they had arrested. During one of the meetings in 2013, Father Paolo was kidnapped. This is when al-Beik decided to upload his film. The film Clapper is a form of respect to the legacy of Father Paolo.

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On 26 July 2013, Father Paolo went on a secret mission to Raqqa, north of Syria, to open a dialogue between all relevant factions:  Islamists, Kurds, extremists, moderates, militants and peaceniks. At the onset of his visit, a video spread through social networking sites showing the inhabitants of Raqqa enthusiastically welcoming and cheering his arrival. He then wrote on his personal Facebook page, ‘I feel happy for being in a liberated city, and for being so warmly welcomed. People here move about freely and in peace. I hope that that will be possible everywhere in Syria.’ Those words were the last the world heard from Father Paolo, followed by nothing but silence; as if to embody the instructions posted on a white placard along the road leading to the Monastery of Saint Moses the Abyssinian: ‘From this point on the visit is spiritual. . . . Thank you for remaining silent.’ During one interview with Father Paolo in the film, he refers to Jerusalem as a spiritual place, rather than a physical place. ‘It is an important symbolic city but you can find Jerusalem everywhere’, he explains to al-Beik. It has never been confirmed what happened to Father Paolo, whether he is still alive or not. He was kidnapped during negotiations with ISIS leadership in Raqqa over the release of prisoners in 2013. No sign of life has been given ever since ISIS imprisoned him. One story circulated that he was executed relatively soon after his arrest in Raqqa. In 2014, the video activist network of Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS) spoke to a witness, an ISIS-defector who claimed to have seen the execution. According to his story, following a demonstration in Raqqa, Father Paolo went to the ISIS leadership in the area and was refused entry twice. He persisted and met a man called Kassab al-Jazrawi, a Saudi national and ISIS leader who was temporarily replacing Abu Luqman, the ISIS Emir of Raqqa who was travelling.27 According to the witness, al-Jazrawi had just come back from killing his brother in Homs, which is an odd claim. If this meant the Dutch Father Francis, he was killed in 2014 and is obviously not Father Paolo’s brother. The witness claims that al-Jazrawi then ordered the detention of Father Paolo. He was taken to the provincial prison. ISIS militants mocked and humiliated him as being an unbeliever. True to his character, Father Paolo then asked one of them his age and when he responded, he told him that he had read the Life of the Prophet before the militant was even born. Defiance and a deep knowledge about Islam marked Father Paolo’s character. Al-Jazrawi, angered by the remark, sent Father Paolo to the Sharia court in al-Mansoura area. After a quick trial, the witness claims that when Father Paolo was sentenced to death, he physically attacked his executioners and was shot fourteen times by al-Jazrawi and another



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Saudi national. When the news of the execution reached Abu Luqman, the ISIS Emir of Raqqa, he flew into a rage against al-Jazrawi because Father Paolo had been a high-profile prisoner. After the rage, they both decided it was best if his death was kept a secret, and Father Paolo’s body was allegedly thrown into the geological formation of Hawta al-Suluk, north of Raqqa. For lack of physical evidence, the Vatican has never confirmed Father Paolo’s death. A friend warned him before going to ISIS headquarters with the same question that the disciples asked Jesus before his death ‘Must you go to Jerusalem?’ and father Paolo replied, ‘Yes, sometimes you must go to Jerusalem, you must go with your physical body in order to be there.’28 A typical phrase that indeed only someone like Father Paolo could have replied with. Verifying and corroborating the story told by the witness is difficult as long as ISIS is still in Raqqa. Until then, many people who knew Father Paolo keep believing he will one day emerge from ISIS captivity. After the film about Deir Mar Musa in 2003, al-Beik sets off on a journey with Hala al-Abdallah’s film I Am the One Who Brings Flowers to Her Grave (2006), described in the previous chapter. It was not until the beginning of the Syrian uprisings that al-Beik finally produced his first feature-length documentary film, Aspirin and a Bullet. Characteristic for al-Beik, the film starts chaotically and gradually takes the spectator into the world and mind of al-Beik, in a structure based on interviews that he has done with friends and a range of film-makers like Manuel De Oliveira, Bernardo Bertolucci, Alexander Sokurov, Zhang Yimou, Pedro Costa, Takashi Miiki, Catherine Breillat, Mohammed Malas, Naomi Kawaze, Ghassan Salhab, Alejandro Iñárritu, Jia Zhangke and Paul Verhoeven, ‘my models taken from life who accepted to silently sit in front of my camera for you to watch them on the sound of Léo Ferré’s songs and poetry.29 My father and my mother, my friend and our mistresses, all sat in front of me to convey about me and them.’30 For him the film is a very concise autobiography, the title of a forty-year-long therapy session. The interviews are intersected by a two-shot of al-Beik with his girlfriend reading out of Robert Bresson’s notes on cinema.31 ‘When the wisdom of Robert Bresson meets the madness of Léo Ferré, when two friends of mine from an older time make one, I am born again,’ says al-Beik.32 The title of the film refers to his father’s suicide attempts. A deeply personal element in the film is conveyed by the often amusing and tragicomic interviews with his mother, who he has sat on a couch. At one point she talks about how she visited the cinema very often when she was young. Then at one point, she wants to get up, because she is tired of the interview. But al-Beik keeps the

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camera running. Annoyed, his mother complains about her husband, that he has given her this; ‘He is a son of a bitch. How come you don’t get it?’ she asks her son. Al-Beik does not reply. The sound of birds dominates the shot. We hear construction work in the background. Her silent look rests on her son. Then she says, ‘May God punish him!’ The call for prayer starts outside, and its sound travels through the windows of his family house into the scene. His mother starts to whisper an Islamic prayer. Despite the interview, she does not want to miss her prayer. She asks if this interview is still going to take a long time. She also tells al-Beik to stop smoking because it is making her cough. The scene cuts to the television screen where we can see a scene from one of Mohammed Malas’s drama films, City of Dreams (1984), an NFO-funded film which was written by Mohammed Malas and Samir Zikra and tells the story of the coming of age of a boy who had to flee Quneitra to Damascus, an autobiographical script. Malas is from Quneitra. The scene on the television, the boy is talking to his mother to talk to him, she says nothing and eventually the boy slaps her face. She tells him ‘he is not worth it’, referring to her father. The scene is followed by a shot with Malas in Amman. He looks into Ammar’s camera and we hear the soundtrack of the City of Dreams where the mother tells the boy (Deeb) to stop. The film then cuts to Ammar’s mother on the couch. She tells him about his father, she took pity on him. He stalked her and had tried to commit suicide with aspirin pills. Then he tried a gun, which was prevented by a relative. Then she married him. The reason for the suicide was because she rejected him at first. It was a psychological bind, he stalked her and then forced her to marry him. She ends with saying that he and his memory can go to hell. Al-Beik eventually turns to the Western film-makers who shaped his youth, a scene from Total Recall by Paul Verhoeven followed by a shot of Verhoeven himself staring into the camera, again with the soundtrack of the scene as audio. As he does with all other film-makers featuring in this film. Al-Beik makes clever use of the soundtracks of the films he has chosen to feature in this film. The scene of Takashi Miiki’s work leaves the spectator with a nauseous taste, because of the sound of sexual torture. Earlier in the film, al-Beik, set the viewer up to the infamous butter rape scene from Last Tango in Paris (1972) by Bernardo Bertolucci, where Marlon Brando rapes his co-star Maria Schneider by putting actual butter pieces in her intimate parts. The effect was that the tears Schneider cries in the scene, are real tears because she did not know this was going to happen. A form of sinister art-making. With intimate scenes between himself and his friend and their mistresses, al-Beik goes further than any Syrian



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documentary film-maker prior to him. This film would certainly not go through the censorship committees of many countries of the Arab world, let  alone the NFO. The film Aspirin and a Bullet is a poetic collage, a painting of moving images of confession, poetry, pain and cinema, as al-Beik himself describes it. Digging into his own memories, al-Beik approaches the medium of documentary film in an essayist style like a painter. He carefully orchestrates the scenes and the framing, the set décor and the rhythm of the editing to the music he has chosen. Although each scene is a tableau by itself, the combination of the different scenes is difficult to follow. The reviews of this film were mixed. The artistic film-making and experimental approach that al-Beik employs in his films are not always appreciated. He filmed the birth of his own daughter, who was born at the same time that another icon of the Syrian Revolution, Hamza al-Khatib, was killed, in March 2011 in Dera’a. The digestion of this horrible news led to his short documentary The Sun’s Incubator (2011). The short film is an intimate essay of Ammar’s own personal experience of the wonder of experiencing a new life in the form of his daughter, while watching the news of the Egyptian Revolution and the graphic videos of the funeral of Hamza al-Khatib from Dera’a, which sparked the Syrian Revolution. The film dedicated to those whose tragic deaths in 2010 and 2011 kickstarted the social revolutions in the Arab world: Hamza al-Khatib (Syria, 1997–2011), Mohammed Bouazizi (Tunisia, 1984–2011) and Khaled Saeed (Egypt, 1982– 2010). Red is an important symbolic colour in the film, both in a positive and a negative sense, the colour red, as a thread throughout the film, symbolizes many things, the blood of the martyrs, the colour of the sun, the colour of freedom. It is something ‘hot’ as Ammar explains himself.33

Hazem al-Hamwi Born in 1980, another documentary film-maker who enjoyed support from the AIF after its foundation was Hazem al-Hamwi, part of the first group of filmmakers who received a grant from the AIF in Amman. He entered the world of film-making as a self-taught experimental film-maker focused on a favourite theme, the place.34 Hazem’s work is foremostly experimental and not always accessible for a wide audience. He has a classical education as a painter from the Higher Academy of Fine Arts in Damascus, where he discovered his love for

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film-making in 2003. He made interesting experimental documentaries such as The Right Side of the Road (2004) and the less experimental Stone Bird (2006). His major feature documentary produced with European co-production was From My Syrian Room (2014). On a warm afternoon in Berlin on 4 June 2017, I  take the metro to a neighbourhood in the city centre of Berlin. Hazem’s wife Lama had given me directions, so I walk towards a grey apartment building where they live. Hazem’s family hails from Salamiyyeh, from the Ismaeli minority, but he grew up in Damascus. I enter his apartment on the third floor and he is sitting in the corner of the living room, smoking a cigarette. Surrounded by his paintings, he greets me with a jovial smile. He is very happy to share his story with me and started talking about how he discovered his passion for film-making despite the negative reactions from his family and pressure to change course. When Omar started the AIF in Amman, I worked a lot to buy a good camera, then the pressure from my family started, why I did not have a job yet, where is your car, why are you not married, where are your children? This was a lot of pressure. So the biological lifestyle all the time attacks you in Syria, saying you are not doing well if you have not done these things. Then I  bought an editing workstation, this was my second mistake in the eyes of my family. When the uprisings started, my bigger brother was making jokes about me and my film activities. He could not understand me, you know. He told me he could support me to have a shawarma shop and make a living so I would not go into filmmaking. I  should forget about this silly filmmaking according to him. After all it is the Ba’athist way, you have to be punished and after that you have to appear and smile to say thank you to those who bit you. My father is in Damascus, and he still is loyal to Assad. Because Assad actually created a kind of fear that will never be removed. I talk to him and always when I discuss it he directly says, what do you want, to support the motherfuckers with beards? Then I keep silent.35

Hazem started filming during the Syrian uprisings, in an environment of extreme fear, with an attempt to find himself. He started interviewing his friends in his room in Damascus, researching his memories, from his youth until the present. In the conversations with his friends he explores the concept of freedom with his old teacher, his girlfriend and ex-prisoner Ghassan,36 who share their experiences with the brutal regime of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad. The sense of fear and despair permeates the images and footage, illustrated with the drawings and cartoons by Hazem himself.



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Between 5 and 10 June in 2011, Hazem was fortunate to participate in a Eurodoc workshop in Croatia, where Eurodoc had invited twenty-eight producers from fifteen countries and ten Arabic producers to develop a documentary project for the international market.37 During this workshop, Hazem made a strong case for support of documentary film-making in Syria because everyone was talking about freedom, and there were a lot of stories happening. After the pitch he got connected to a French producer and received funding for a budget of 100,000 euro with support from IDFA, Arte, France24 and many others. Hazem was afraid and overwhelmed. Also the challenges of film-making inside Syria started to dawn upon him. It’s very difficult. We don’t have a DoP [Director of Photography] or a cameraman. Every person is working in different areas. So, if I want to film something in an area, maybe I’ll send someone from that area, people will trust him or her and they will agree to film with him or her. It’s a new thing for me. I cannot appear in some interviews because I cannot go to some places. We’re working on this project in very special situations. We developed new techniques to give each one his job or her job. Sometimes, cameramen they don’t know each other. Now we are four and one of us is filming in a very hot place – I mean the war – but the other three are in several places in Syria.38

Hazem developed a kind of difficult relationship with the producer, who demanded that the editing would take place in France. He did not want to leave his material with her, without knowing what the producer and editor would do with it in the edit room. Moreover, he had also been arrested by the mukhabarat in Damascus. After the arrest, I put the plan to leave. I was psychologically not able to believe that I  would leave. I  kept filming but more careful and already I  was filming inside the rooms. I started drawing, drawing, drawing a lot. Like crazy. What made me leave Damascus was the editing. Because look to the story, there was no editor in Damascus, or Beirut, not even in Tunisia. It could not be edited in the Arab world. This made me angry. The producer demanded it had to be edited in France. She works with a very strong editor. She is very professional. The film should be edited in Montpellier. But I felt like so much under pressure by her. I was not comfortable with that. She put me in a difficult position, with my father pro-Assad, me against the regime and my friends still here. When she is editing with all the material in France, without me. So I told her I should come. One of the most beautiful days in my life was my flight from Damascus to Montpellier in France.39

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Figure 2.2  One of Hazem’s paintings drawn during his first period in Berlin, 2014. © H. Hamwi.

In Berlin, where he later moved, Hazem became very angry; he felt extremely negative, disillusioned by the Syrian Revolution and fell into a deep depression and a period of near psychosis. He was drawing extensively; it became an extreme obsession, hundreds and hundreds of drawings piled up in his place in Berlin. He used discarded wood to draw on. He felt the obsessive urge to paint and draw repetitively (see Figure 2.2). It was only when his fiancée came from Syria and his friends came to him that the obsessive compulsory urge to draw started to slow down. After that, he decided that with his next film project, he would be more careful to choose a good producer and take it much more slowly than the rushed work for From My Syrian Room.

Nidal Hassan Born in 1974, Nidal Hassan is another highly talented Syrian film-maker from the new generation that emerged in the 2000s after the era of the Syrian cinema masters. He studied film in Armenia, returned as an employee for the NFO in 2003 and after the uprisings, he left Syria in 2012. He was detained on route to the Copenhagen Documentary festival in November 2011, where he was due



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to present his film True Stories of Love, Life, Death, and Sometimes Revolution (2012) co-directed with Danish artist Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen. He currently resides and works in Berlin and was part of the Berlinale Talents group of 2015. His debut feature-length documentary entitled Flint Mountains (2009) is a personal and moving portrait of stonemason sculptor Abu Bairam, in the western mountainous part of Syria. In a village surrounded by rocks and limestone, Abu Bairam has a special gift of seeing beauty and poetry in natural stones. He has collected and gathered thousands of rocks over the years that he has displayed around his house. He is well known in his native village and creates artworks from the stones he has collected. The film follows Abu Bairam with his friends and their lives, filled with friendship and simple joys. The cinematography and intimate portrait of this amicable man, his passion for nature and stones and his incredible imagination, makes this film an artistic gem. True Stories of Love, Life, Death, and Sometimes Revolution is an essayistic documentary that Nidal made in collaboration with Danish artist Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen. The collaboration had already been initiated in 2010 during a Danish-sponsored exchange and collaborative programme bringing together European film-makers and artists with film-makers from the developing world. Initially Lilibeth and Nidal, who did not know each other prior to the collaboration, set out to make a documentary about violence against women in Syria. But then the uprisings started in 2011 and Nidal changed his camera eye to the reality as it unfolds in front of him. The lines between Nidal’s own life, his protagonists and the film become blurred while we witness the waves of protests and the brutal crackdowns. Hassan finds himself in the middle of the revolt with a camera that forces him to become a documenter of the revolution. Gradually, he loses friends who disappear behind bars. Eventually, he himself ends up being arrested on his way to Denmark and disappears for an indefinite amount of time. After his prison time, he flees to Lebanon and then to Germany. Not anticipated at the beginning of this film project, Nidal has become one of the major protagonists of the film, sharing his deep reflections on a society in turmoil and his own forced evacuation from the country he considers his homeland. Both films by Nidal Hassan are of extremely high quality artistically and technically, albeit that his first documentary feature was not particularly critical of the regime. His second documentary film, maybe unwillingly, flung Nidal into becoming a critical film-maker who has focused his camera on himself and the society he has grown up in. Through the Syrian Revolution and his detention, Nidal became a creative dissident film-maker. In 2015, he was selected for

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the Berlinale Talents pool and started working on two other projects that are currently in production.

Alfoz Tanjour Alfoz Tanjour was born in 1975 in Salamiyyeh, Syria, and studied film direction at the Academy of Fine Arts in Moldova. When he returned to Syria in 2004, Alfoz felt like a stranger to his own country and looked at it with different eyes; he realized that many of the people he knew were simply not genuinely happy.40 Some years after, he produced his first 35-mm short film, A Little Sun (2007), with support of the NFO and Hanna Ward on board as DOP. Luna is a young girl living in the city centre of Damascus. The film starts with her sitting on a rooftop wall at her house, overlooking her neighbourhood, which she enjoys doing using her binoculars. She observes her neighbour, her friend Ossama, who plays in an old empty car, a red balloon attached to the car, in stark contrast amongst the grey buildings. The shot is framed as a point-of-view shot, masked with binocular frame giving it a subtle and innocent voyeurism. The sequence, however, does remind those who knew Syria that watching Damascus from above is only privileged to either the doves or the mukhabarat. Fares Helou plays the role of her father, who sits behind his computer, smoking cigarettes and working. He is a journalist having a conflict with the editor of a newspaper who refuses to publish large parts of a letter he has written. Her father is on the phone with the editors, complaining. Ossama talks to his dad and tells his father that has difficulties with the newspaper. Luna’s birthday is the next day and she tries to tell her dad, but he is so immersed in his fight with the editor that he does not register her remark about her birthday. He prints out his letter and asks her to photocopy it. She takes the letter and, together with her friend Ossama, she goes on a bike to paste the photocopied letter on the walls of Damascus for everyone to read. The next day she goes to her friend Ossama, who is in the old car. ‘Where do you want to go?’ he asks. Ossama reminds her to close the window, which she does. He has written ‘Happy Birthday’ for her on the window. Sitting in the car, they take an imaginary trip through Damascus together. Later, she goes on her bike, with the red balloon attached. Riding back home, she sees her father in the back of a police car, being deported. She follows the car on her bike, passing Ossama who shouts and wants to run after her. His father pulls him back. Luna follows the car on her bike intersected by a shot of her father seeing her following the car.



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In the pursuit of the car that carries away her dad, she gets hit by a car, and the viewer hears the sound of the accident followed by a shot of her fallen bike. Out of anger, Ossama sets fire to the old car they played in and returns to the empty house of her family and finds the binoculars. A Little Sun is not a documentary, but I mention Tanjour’s film here for two reasons; its strong dissident value and the importance of resistant symbolism exposing everyday life under a dictatorship that further permeates the entire oeuvre of Tanjour. The film is a strong critique of the regime’s oppression of Syrians, experienced through the eyes of a small girl with a red balloon. The story has many layers that any Syrian can identify with. After the editing, the NFO officials were shocked and told Tanjour to take out many scenes. The film eventually went on to win the Bronze Tanit Award of the Carthage Film Festival and a Special Jury Prize at the Mons festival in Belgium. Tanjour made other films, but documentaries eventually started to dominate his filmography. Constrained by the NFO structure of film industry but unconstrained by the increasing technical availability and acceptance of high-end cameras shooting at broadcast quality, Alfoz started to work for the documentary channel of Al Jazeera media organization. There is no money and no real industry in Syria for realising documentaries. The mentality of accepting documentaries in the Arabic world is very limited. In 2003, the Al Jazeera Documentary Channel started, they began to make a lot of films and to spread this culture of documentaries in our world. From that moment I  would say, that the filmmakers began to find their ways to make their documentaries. Me for example, I worked for the documentary channel Al Jazeera and Al Jazeera network as well as some other stations. (Alfoz Tanjour quoted in Piorkowska, 2016)41

Because they had participated in several demonstrations, Tanjour and his wife, Linda, left Syria in 2012, via Beirut and ended up in Austria with their two children.42 Tanjour continued working as a director on documentaries for broadcast television and produced two important forty-five-minute documentaries for the Al Jazeera World series; Syria, the Battle Beyond (2014) and Death of Aleppo (2016). In Syria, the Battle Beyond43 Tanjour travels to Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan to document the lives and stories of a number of Syrian dissidents and protesters in exile. These are researchers, journalists, relief workers, artists and many other middle-class Syrians who were participating in the first demonstrations

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against the regime and eventually fled the country under death threats, after incarceration and arrests. In this forty-five-minute television documentary Tanjour manages to capture the breadth of the Syrian Revolution, how the revolutionaries from the beginning wanted to stay non-violent but were forced to go into exile due to the extreme government crackdown on the middleclass educated protesters. Tanjour follows a scholar, a theatre director, medical workers and a women’s rights campaigner. Their individual stories show they share the same dream of fighting for a free and democratic Syria. They are all convinced that one day Syria will be changed and the war will end. The film follows their daily struggles in exile and their hopes of returning to their homeland one day. The film features Syrian documentary producer and video journalist Naji Jerf in Gaziantep, who trained journalists in Dera’a. He fled to Jordan when he was arrested on the Jordanian border and deported to Turkey. In Gaziantep, he continued to train and set up media centres with young Syrians. The film follows him in Gaziantep, where he feels at home. Naji made the documentary Da’esh in Aleppo (2015) in Aleppo where he documented the presence of Da’esh in the Free Syrian Army (FSA)-controlled areas of Aleppo city. This documentary led to several direct death threats to Naji while he was residing in Gaziantep. On the morning of 27 December 2015, he was assassinated by Da’esh agents inside Turkey. Death of Aleppo44 is another Al Jazeera World series documentary directed by Alfoz Tanjour in the years 2014/15. This television documentary is one of Tanjour’s bravest films. Together with a young group of film-makers inside Aleppo, the film documents the siege of the city and the continuation of the Syrian Revolution in eastern Aleppo City. They preferred to remain anonymous due to security reasons. The film-maker team shot at various locations in Aleppo such as Bustan al-Qasr, Salaheddin, al-Kalasa besieged by the Syrian regime and the Russian army. The focus was on a small group of people. Daily life continues despite the frequent barrel bombs that bring death and destruction. The documentary contains harrowing drone imagery of the rubble in the city. The characters of the documentary live in the Old City of Aleppo. The film-makers visit the Mar Elias Nursing Home for the elderly, where they interview Michel Abou Yousef, a Christian resident who lost everything, and like the others from the Old City, he got too used to the sound of the bombs and is fed up. He hopes God is going to rescue them from this suffering. The film is posthumously dedicated to Michel Abou Yousef who was killed in an aerial bombardment after the recordings for this film. The film concludes with young children of a paramedic nurse, who is singing a most famous revolutionary song about freedom.45



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Tanjour’s latest film A Memory in Khaki (2016) is a cinema feature documentary and tells the compelling story of what it is like to grow up in a dictatorial society like Syria. Through archival footage in Syria and newly shot material with exiled Syrians in Europe, the long film guides the viewer to some of the most poignant and, certainly for Syrians, recognizable elements of daily life under oppression of the Assad regime. Tanjour used his own memory and the collective memory of Syrians to show what living in the so-called Kingdom of Silence meant for him.46 The opening shot is of a green field of barley where a small boy is running, archival footage of Syrian countryside. Most probably Salamiyyeh, where Tanjour grew up. The story then continues in the Souq Hamidiyyeh in Damascus, where a big red balloon is let loose, a subtle reference to his first short film drama, A Little Sun. We meet Ibrahim in Damascus, prior to the uprisings of 2011, but as a writer very critical of the regime, albeit indirectly. He describes how he is a son of Damascus, but he and the city cannot reconcile, the spirit of Damascus is damaged, as he is damaged. He feels a stranger in his own city. Fast-forward to the future, we meet Khaled, a Syrian artist in Germany who lost many of his family members in the massacre of Hama in 1982. He introduces the symbolism and the memories that are attached to khaki, a colour of repression and fear. For him it resembled the biggest fear. It was the colour of the school uniforms, of the army, of the interrogators. Khaki is embedded in every Syrian, he says. The interviews are intersected with stunning drone sequences of bombed-out buildings in Hama. Tanjour shares the memory he has as child of visiting his dissident aunt then introduces her living in Finland. He introduces his friend Shadi in Paris whom he met at the NFO, where he was working as assistant director. Shadi was the first to participate in the demonstrations of 2011. He left in 2012, via Jordan. He explains some people became revolutionaries because they had hope. Alfoz bridges the sequence with Shadi in Paris with a cross-dissolve of Shadi standing at a windowsill in France similar to a shot of windows in Salamiyyeh. The parallel montage of the main characters of the film works well, and the viewer gets an intimate overview of the life trajectories of those who opposed the regime, intersected by archive footage of a boy in Salamiyyeh, who seems to symbolize Tanjour himself. There is a sequence of a derelict cinema in Salamiyyeh, where the boy explores the remains of a time long gone. Drone imagery of Hama precedes the story of Khalid in Germany who is obsessed with the colour khaki. The biggest taming of the Syrian people, he says, is through the colour khaki. He calculated that in his khaki school uniform he had recited 3,241 times the mandatory Assadist slogans every morning at his

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school. If the student failed, physical abuse would follow. Amathell in Finland recounts in detail the story of her arrest and subsequent hiding and exile when she was a young woman. Shadi in France tells Tanjour he organized his first demonstration in 1998, because the regime had lost its ideological justification after the fall of the Soviet Union, and then the extreme corruption of the Assad regime surfaced. Shadi says, people started the revolution in Syria, it was not organized, it was years of oppression. Amathell in Finland reflects upon being a long-term exiled Syrian female dissident; for ten years she has been a wanted person. This is an indescribably difficult fate. In the film Tanjour also reflects upon his own exile and refugeehood in Austria. He inserts a subtle sequence of his own children jumping on the bunk bed of the asylum centre when they just arrived in Vienna. Ibrahim is filmed in 2009 in Damascus and in 2016 in Amman, Jordan. He explains that leaving his country feels like going to the grave, but he left Syria because he refused to be someone’s property any longer. He recounts his days in Assad’s prison. Prisoners are objects, they are nothing. Ibrahim had struggled to have what others outside Syria took for granted. Freedom. Now he feels sad to be Syrian and wonders when other generations will rise up again. The film then introduces the refugees on Lesbos, the graves of those Syrians who did not make it. The harrowing site of unknown graves in Lesbos makes the viewer realize the depth of the tragedy of the Syrian people. A symbolic shot of a hanging fish with a Greek flag in the faded background enhances the feeling of despair. One of Tanjour’s characteristic cinematographic traits is to be able to capture many layers of the story in one symbolic shot. In the last sequence, we hear Shadi listening to a speech of Trump who indicates that all these Syrian refugees could well be ISIS extremists. After listening to and watching the personal stories of the characters of the film, the hollowness of these kinds of political remarks about Syrian refugees is even more apparent.

Ziad Kalthoum In the mid-2000s Ziad Kalthoum made a film about Kurdish women, Oh My Heart (2009), which tells the story of these women from the north of Syria, which was intriguing and until then quite taboo in Syria due to the denial and repression of Kurdish identity there. Immediately banned by the Assad regime, his debut film did not reach a very wide audience, in or outside Syria. Ziad’s latest film Taste of Cement (2017) was mainly shot in Beirut after Ziad moved



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there before settling in Berlin. It has already won a lot of prizes at international film festivals due to its stunning cinematography, capturing Beirut from high angles and the use of drone photography. Supported by Bidayyat as a feature film grant project, the film was screened at Visions du Réel, where it received rave reviews as a breathtaking masterpiece. The film won the Best Film Award at the Visions du Réel in 2017 and was nominated for the Best European Film Award at Doc Alliance in the same year. Since his degree in film studies, Ziad Kalthoum had been active in the fiction film industry in Syria as assistant director, among others, on Mohammed Malas’s film, Ladder to Damascus. At the time of the recording of this film, Ziad served his military service with the Syrian Arab Army. During the day he was tasked to take care of the state national archive of propaganda films for the Syrian regime army at one of their army bases, and during the afternoons and evenings he was working on set with Ladder to Damascus in the city centre of Damascus. He started filming with his mobile phone and a small digital camera, while he was on duty, filming mostly his own feet walking and during the shoot of a Ladder to Damascus. The result is a gripping documentary that manages to capture the haunted schizophrenic feeling that many of the drafted soldiers experienced in the Syrian Arab Army during the uprisings. The schizophrenia is also prevalent on the set of Malas’s film. Kalthoum manages to get close to the crew, filming their experiences and reactions when the sound of airplanes is heard during shooting, which forces the camera and sound team to stop recording because of the noise. It was at a public screening at the Film School in Copenhagen where I first watched Ziad’s film The Immortal Sergeant; Ziad was present for a Q&A afterwards. The film had premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2014. I was not aware that my good old friend Joude Gorani would be a character in Ziad’s film as part of the twelve-member crew. When I  saw her on the big screen it struck me how affected I was by seeing a personal friend suddenly in this surreal situation in an old house in Damascus. The sound of the planes affects everyone in the crew. Ziad captures the emotions on their faces, looking up, listening to the sky. The emotional despair of the crew members, some of whom come from the targeted areas. The film is full of intimate moments of human interaction that are touching for the audience. The homeless man, who sits outside of the cinema, missing his son, who died a soldier; the moments between the crew members, when they discuss the war; even the small interview with the pro-Assad actress leaves the audience with empathy and compassion for the Syrians in the film who find themselves in this absurdistic

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Kafkaesque situation. Zaid’s own fear and schizophrenic life as a sergeant recruit in the army, having to live two or even three lives, is something all Syrians would recognize. The film registers Malas’s emotions on his face when a shooting day had to be cancelled, while Malas is chain smoking. One of the most intense scenes is when a crew member from Yarmouk in a passing conversation mentions he and his family have to leave the Palestinian camp because the army is going to shell it, and he just hears that one of his best friends got killed in a shelling. The camera relentlessly follows him running to the toilet, weeping and slumping into a chair in despair. All the time in the film, we do not see Kalthoum’s face, but his legs in khaki, walking to his place as a sergeant at the cinema theatre. The film is a tribute to Malas but also through the images in the forgotten cinema theatre, to Nazih Shahbandar, Syria’s cinema pioneer.47 At the end of the film, Kalthoum declares his defection from the Syrian Army and refrains from joining any other combat army, including the FSA, due to his desire for peace and freedom. He considers the camera the only weapon he carries.48 Eventually, Kalthoum deserts from the army and currently lives in Berlin. Kalthoum’s film came out in 2014, just like Ossama Mohammed’s Silvered Water: Syria Self-Portrait (2014) and Return to Homs (2013). In that sense, 2014 was an exceptional year for Syrian documentary. All these three films convey a deeply emotional story connected to the Syrian Revolution. However, of all three films, Kalthoum’s Immortal Sergeant is the only film of that year that conveys the eerie calmness and the situation of kafkaesque schizophrenia leading the audience through what it was like to live and work in government-controlled areas during the Syrian Revolution.

Talal Derki Born in 1977, Talal Derki studied film in Athens at the Stavrako High Institute of Cinematographic Art and Television, from where he graduated in 2003. He worked for years as assistant director on various feature film productions. In 2010, he made his first documentary short called Hero of All Seas (2010). This twenty-eight-minute film follows Kurdish emigrants who tried to flee to Europe but failed and ended up in Greece. In particular, one man named Abo who was called hero of the seas because he managed to swim from Turkey to Greece. But seeing the misery where emigrants in Greece find themselves, the film questions the meaning of hero.



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Since the beginning of the Syrian Revolution, Derki made two documentary shorts Azadi (2011) and Lajat (2012) under a different name, out of concern for his own and his family’s security. Specifically, the film Azadi (2011)49 received a lot of attention after it won the Silver Hawk at the Arab Film Festival (Rotterdam) 2011. It was produced in collaboration with Al-Share3 foundation for Media and Development and filmed in Qamishly and the northeastern Kurdish areas (Derki is of Kurdish descent). It portrays daily events of the Syrian Revolution and how every day is affected by these developments. It is a twenty-two-minute eye-opening portrait of Syrian Kurdish revolutionaries, also because the documentary highlights the Kurdish resistance against the Syrian government in 2004. The film that put Talal Derki’s name on the map of the international documentary film industry was the previously mentioned Return to Homs. It was the opening film at the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2013 and won the Sundance Film Festivals World Cinema Grand Jury Prize in 2014. The film highlights the life and leadership of renowned Syrian soccer player and singer Abd al-Basit al-Sarout, who became one of the major leaders of the protests in Homs. The film starts with scenes of Sarout singing to the crowds of protesters, then the spectator is plunged into the chaos of the crackdown and protests and yet another sequence of violence, as with Silvered Water (2014). But the story starts to emerge against the background of revolutionary Homs, called the Capital of the Syrian Revolution. We follow the transformations of Sarout from soccer champion to revolutionary singer to fighter with the FSA.50 Sarout lost over seventy of his friends in the siege of Homs; he becomes hardened and resolved to take revenge and not let the blood of his friends be in vain. Return to Homs is a very brave film, recorded with a team led by Derki; even under siege, the team managed to film and get the footage out of the country. It was filmed over a period of two years from the end of 2011. It was one of the first films that brought the inner world of the Syrian Revolution to the international documentary audience with a deeply emotional and touching intensity. The main criticism the film received from Syrian activist film-makers themselves is that it was specifically made for a Western audience. It is filming the destruction of Syria. The level of violence is quite high. The risks that film-makers were taking were extreme. Because Syria was a warzone, in 2014 there was an upsurge of interest in anything coming out of the country because of the violence and contemporary value of the stories coming from the front lines of the Syrian war. The question is who of the professional Syrian film-makers will sustain the

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success of their films at this level of interest after the war, with different stories, deeper, without the violence on the front lines. Derki’s film Of Fathers and Sons (2018) is another act of extreme bravery by this Syrian film-maker. In order to understand oppositional Syria in the province of Idlib, Derki smuggles himself back in, while already living in exile in Berlin. He starts living and filming with a family led by Abu Ossama, one of the leaders of the notorious Al-Qaeda-linked jihadi factions, Jabhat al-Nusra. Abu Ossama, a father of eight children, has named his oldest son after Ossama bin Laden and is a convinced military jihadi, fighting to establish God’s Kingdom on earth. The personal risks that Derki took to stay (and return several times) with this jihadi family living in a devastated environment in Idlib are considerable, much like in his debut film. Abu Ossama leads demining efforts, and Derki follows him on these missions, leading to excruciatingly tense scenes that leave viewers puzzled as to how Derki and his cinematographer, Kahtan Hassoun, survived the production of this film. Eventually, Abu Ossama does get injured on one of the demining missions, which creates a dramatic scene where his children are crying inconsolably as Abu Ossama returns home, carried in between two of his mates. We hear the crying women in the background, we never see them. The film portrays, on the one hand, a kind of loving, surprisingly tender relationship between a father and his sons; on the other hand, the structural violence is omnipresent and in the background under the black flag of al-Qaeda. Whether Abu Ossama is talking about his deep admiration for bin Laden and his ‘great deeds’ or is scolding and physically punishing his children, even the kids casually telling their father that they beheaded a bird, ‘like he did with that man’ or playing with a self-constructed landmine, these detailed conversations between the father and his sons are chilling. Eventually, the initial playful innocence of the children, kicking their cans on the dusty school playground, slowly vanishes in the film and the boys are drafted into a jihadi training camp. In one of the more intimate scenes, the boys are discussing, while in their beds and sleeping bags, how they do not enjoy the harsh military training of the camp. They express a mix of innocence, playfulness and boredom and a strong sense arises that these children are not where they are supposed to be, they should be playing, they are kids. Then Derki cuts to the tough group exercises in the blistering heat that the kids have to take part in during the day. These scenes are harrowing; the film starts with the relative innocence of the children who, through these violent circumstances, gradually change into ruthless fighters. Derki’s last remark in the film, as he is leaving Syria, refers to a country he does



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not recognize as his own anymore. In March 2018, I had a long conversation with Derki. He told me he took great risks to explore extremism and show how deeply seated violence is in Syrian society, starting with the children at an early age. This deep-seated violence affects Syrian children more than anything. He recognized some of this structural violence from his own childhood. He explained to me:  ‘Growing up in Syria, meant growing up with ever present violence and militarism, whether from the domestic violence, the school, the Ba’athist Youth groups, the military and in the case of Of Fathers and Sons, in a jihadi military household. This is the deep structural problem we have in Syria as a country, it affects entire generations and specifically I wanted to show how it affects innocent children. It will take a very long time to ever change that . . . now this is not the revolution that we had in mind when we started to demand democracy, dignity and freedom.’51 Of Fathers and Sons won Derki’s second Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Filmfestival in 2018 and was Oscar nominated for Best Foreign Language Documentary in 2019.

Avo Kaprealian Inspired by Syrian film-maker Hala al-Abdallah Yaqoub, Avo Kaprealian, born in 1987, remembers meeting her in 2009 and being impressed by her art and dissidence. She seemed to him the ultimate artist, taking her freedom not waiting for the government to give that. Initially, film-making was not his first choice, but after meeting with al-Abdallah, he changed his mind:  ‘She was a hero for our young generation, I  could actually say she was our Godmother. She did many private workshops in Damascus and also in parallel with the Dox Box Festivals. We learned so much from her.’52 Avo was initially educated at the Damascus School for Fine Arts as a theatre graduate in dramaturgy. He was still living in Damascus in 2011, but at the beginning of the uprisings, he moved back to Aleppo in 2012. Aleppo is where he is born and raised, as a third-generation Armenian immigrant to Syria. He was working with internally displaced refugees because he wanted to do something back. There were many refugees around in his neighbourhood coming from the countryside of Aleppo. He identified with the feeling of being displaced. He sensed that a catastrophe was coming in this period. He started to film because he felt his mind was awake and his eyes as well. He was only catching moments. He never wanted to do a documentary until the troubles began to become serious, when the displaced people increased dramatically in the city.

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At that point, he started to document the moments, which eventually led to Houses without Doors (2016), his first feature documentary film. Before that he had made only one short film. During daytime he worked in the refugee theatre that he had set up. He worked with all ages of refugees or displaced people who were very down. They were so miserable that he thought the only way they might cope is by theatre, to give them some joy. He saw it as his main job to do. Unfortunately, the government came and closed down the centre in Midan. He set it up again in al-Aziziyyeh, the Christian quarter, but the Midan neighbourhood for him was the symbol of refuge. It used to be a camp for Armenian people. To him, it was an important aspect for his own personal experience during the Syrian Revolution. Avo was arrested twice in this period, the first time because he was filming the displaced people. It was just questioning. He was recording in late 2011 and 2012. He filmed everything around Aleppo. He had his hard disk full of footage. When the refugees came, he filmed all of them. One of them, he was selling coffee, informed the police. Avo was arrested and questioned about the filming. They only took his hard disk and gave him a warning. The second time, he was arrested with his friend. They had a camera and were filming. He was held for four weeks in prison. He talks about his ordeal in prison, ‘In the beginning of the four weeks they beat us so badly, so hard and tortured us. And then they waited until we recovered. We are Christian, so they didn’t want to show that they had been beating us. When we came out of the prison we had no blue spots any more.’53 The Christian community, however, was not understanding, Avo and his friends were told not to mention anything about what happened in the prison. They were not supposed to talk about it. As if it never happened. Avo left in September 2014. He went to Lebanon, which was a very difficult trip. The hardest part was that he was threatened by both sides, the government side and the opposition side. It was the last time he saw Aleppo. In Lebanon, he started a process of catharsis, looking through all the material he had recorded in Aleppo. In 2014, I  began to collect all the material and watch it back. This is what happened in itself and was developing it to watch a film about history about what happened about what I saw and then the film developed by itself. When I was in Beirut, Ali Atassi and Bidayyat embraced my film, so I edited the film in Beirut with their editor. We worked for a year on the film. For me, we are all traumatised so for me editing was an important process. As an Armenian, when I was a seven year-old, I got a book about the Armenian genocide. This was my first shock about humanity. It woke me up. Maybe that is why I put the



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film about Mexico in my film. Here’s a very free man free of any ideology and background free of any fixed thinking. It is his individual freedom that many people look for. I would not call it a revolution movement is maybe the good word. The people who wanted individual freedom are now all outside. Our goal is not to lose our identities in this period, not to get lost here. Through this, I am remembering the Armenian experience at the same time.54

The film opens with a Mexican fiction-film scene in the desert and a cowboy wearing a naked boy on his back. The boy sits against a pole and the man gives him a teddy bear to bury because he is seven now and he’s becoming a man. The boy buries a portrait of his mom and his first toy. He has become a man now. Then the film starts with the title ‘Aleppo 1915 to 2015’. Avo filmed most of the film from his parent’s balcony. His father tells him that secret police are everywhere now. A close-up of his father’s face looking down on the street is accompanied with the sound of planes. We get the same pictures with the voice of Syria’s astronaut. The background music becomes dystopic, we see street scenes of shaky images of windows and of people. We hear sniper fire again and again. It is twilight in the street, the camera zooms in, zooms out searching for the smoke, but Avo’s father is panicking and tells Avo to turn down the camera. We see the smoke and the fire. A group of five men is just sitting in front of the pharmacy in front of his house as if nothing is happening. The psychedelic music starts with a close-up of his mom peeking over the balcony, smoking a cigarette. The film has a deep and certainly high level of artistic value but might not be accessible for everyone because of its essayist nature. Back to the balcony, we see people are starting to leave their homes. The story of the Armenian genocide is interwoven with the Syrian war people want to leave, of people surviving, of people being killed, of soldiers not hearing. The film is not very accessible for a wider audience without prior knowledge of Syria or the Armenian genocide. We get a view over the city of Aleppo; in the background there are clouds of smoke. Avo films from above, out of focus, people standing and sitting next to the tyres of checkpoints, people standing in line for the food and the bread, all happening right below his balcony. Cars are parked, people are sitting waiting until they get food, a little girl is on the balcony and moves away with her little hand-bag. His camera is filming a helicopter. Back in the family house, there was a birth of a little baby. We get a peek into normal family situation, an Armenian family in Aleppo, music on the background but then shellings. We see archive footage, real footage of bodies being thrown into mass graves. Followed by footage of Avo’s street with security forces, people carrying a body through the street intersected by footage of protests.

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The epilogue is a speech to the president about the beauty of Syria, and Avo films his mother on the new balcony in Beirut talking to him in Armenian; she’s had a dream that she went back and didn’t find the door to her house, and she doesn’t think they will be able to return to Aleppo. This is what the dream meant to her. A  house without a door means no house anymore. The last shots are wobbly shots of a Lebanese street in the rain from above then archive footage of the Armenian genocide, children running for bread, ladies throwing bread into the ground for the children. Together with Last Men in Aleppo (2017) from Firas Fayyad, the film Houses without Doors (2016) is one of the best documentary films filmed in Aleppo since the start of the Syrian Revolution. It is an auteur film, it appeals to the different histories of Aleppo and an impressive and haunting personal account of one street in the west side of Aleppo city. Watching Houses without Doors in combination with Last Men in Aleppo will give viewer a comprehensive view of what happened during the Syrian Revolution in Aleppo from both sides of the city, the eastern side under control of the FSA and the western side under the control of the Assad regime. Houses without Doors (2016) is in stark contrast to another documentary film shot in the western side of Aleppo city by another Armenian/Arab photographer from Syria. Issa Touma, shot a personal documentary short from his balcony called 9 Days – From My Window in Aleppo (2015), which he co-directed with young Dutch film-makers Thomas Vroege and Floor van der Meulen who had no in-depth knowledge about Syria prior to 2011. The film is shot entirely by Touma himself, giving the perspective from his balcony in Aleppo city centre, claiming that the Syrian Revolution never started peacefully. It is a personal account of events in the western side of Aleppo city from 2012 from a perspective supported by the Assad regime, indeed, not acknowledging the peaceful start of the Syrian Revolution back in 2011. The documentary value of this film is questionable and the story of the start of the Syrian Revolution is certainly not told through this film. First, the film does not show the full story of what happened in this street, it is only from the side of the regime-controlled area of Aleppo. The film claims that Touma’s house is situated in the east of Aleppo, which in fact is not true. It is located near Telal, which is not eastern Aleppo. Second, the film is entirely in line with the narrative of the Assad regime about Aleppo city and its siege. The account of the events in this film is not the full picture and some of the events are simply left out in the film. For example, when the Assad-regime army took over Touma’s street, they ransacked his apartment and stole many valuables.55 This fact is completely ignored in his film.



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Mohammed Abdelaziz, a Syrian photographer from Aleppo who has filmed and photographed all over Syria during the Syrian Revolution, was very stark in his criticism towards Touma’s documentary film and specifically the cinematographer Issa Touma himself. According to another Syrian filmmaker from Aleppo, who now resides in the Netherlands, Touma’s film is pure propaganda for the Assad regime, he seriously doubts the truthfulness of the narrative, considering the location of Touma’s house in west Aleppo and the very short period when the FSA was in control of that street.56 Despite the value for Assadist propaganda and the controversy about its documentary value, Touma’s film received an award for the best short film at the European Film Awards in 2016. Under the claim of being at personal risk in Syria, he also received a stipend from ICORN in Sweden to take up residence in the city of Gävle, north of Stockholm, for two years. At the same time he was able to travel back to Aleppo several times in 2017, with knowledge of the Assad regime and Syrian government. Only documentary film-makers who are in cahoots with the Assad regime are in fact able to do that. Had he been an independent documentary film-maker, he would have been arrested on the spot by Assad’s secret police. Also while resident in Sweden, he engages foremostly with pro-regime SyrianSwedish groups such as the Syriska Riksförbundet in Vällingby.

Soudade Kaadan A very talented female film-maker who emerged at the end of the first decade of the rule of Bashar al-Assad, was Soudade Kaadan who was educated in France and Lebanon and born in France but with a strong family history in Damascus. She consequently worked as a director and producer for Al Jazeera’s Arabic Documentary Channel. She made some impressive short documentaries like Two Cities and a Prison (2008) and Looking for Pink (2009). One of her first feature-length documentaries Damascus Roof and Tales of Paradise (2010)57 is located in the Old City of Damascus where Kaadan’s family hails from. In a beautiful display of colours, carefully composed sequences in the romantic Old City of Damascus, Kaadan leads the viewers through the city of her forebears with a rich tradition of storytelling whereby the stories are being passed on from generation to generation. The film is an attempt to save and conserve these stories before Damascus will succumb to the devastating influences of modernization. It is a moving and picturesque film, which shows the highly talented skill of Kaadan to tell a visually compelling and beautiful story. The

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film won the second prize at the Dubai Film Festival and was winner of the Mediterranean Art, Heritage and Culture prize at The PriMed, International Festival for Mediterranean Documentary and Current Affair film-PRIMEDFRANCE. Kaadan went on to make her first feature-length documentary film after the start of the Syrian Revolution called Obscure (2017) where she captures in a moving visual masterpiece, the story of a traumatized refugee boy who has lost his ability to talk.

A new platform for documentary: The Dox Box Festival in Damascus In 2006, documentary film-maker couple Diana Jeiroudi and Orwa Nyrabia had set up their film production company in Damascus, transforming from advertising to documentary. Diana started working at her first feature documentary Dolls:  A Woman from Damascus (2007) of which Joude Gorani had been cinematographer. The pitch of the crew at the renowned International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) had been very successful, so they had promises of good funding for the film. At that time, both the couple and Joude had started talking about organizing a documentary festival in Damascus.58 The first edition of Dox Box was organized in 2008. Joude Gorani was part of the selection committee. IDFA turned out to be a great help and the film-maker couple Diana and Orwa thought it would be good to start this kind of festival to create a network and platform for new upcoming documentary film-making talent in Syria, at the same time bringing documentary to Syria. By organizing a festival, it could create a documentary movement in Syria that would be of interest to their production company as well. Diana Jeiroudi is an established director and although her film Dolls:  A Woman from Damascus (2007) did less well than expected from the initial pitch, her next short film, she directed together with young Syrian film-maker Guevara Namer called Morning Fears, Night Chants (2012) about a young Syrian woman who is rebelling against her restrictive parents by making songs for revolutionary activities. This film was done under two pseudonyms (Salma Aldairy and Roula Ladqani) though the company Syrians Within Borders founded in 2011 and until Jeiroudi left the country, was based in Damascus. The film premiered at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival in 2012. Orwa Nyrabia, was a young actor and assistant director to Ossama Mohammed while a student and afterwards employed with the NFO after his



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education with the Damascus Higher Academy of Arts. He is the producer of the highly acclaimed documentary film Return to Homs and one of the producers of Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait. He also serves on the juries of various international film festivals such as IDFA, DokLeipzig and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Together with his wife and business partner, they founded the production company ProAction Film, which moved from Syria, via Egypt, in 2012 to Berlin in 2013, where the company is now called No Nation Films.59 The major challenges for Dox Box were with the Syrian government, not the funding. The authorization was through the NFO. Funding-wise, the festival had a cooperation with the IDFA festival. Often the NFO would try to censor the films that were selected or the Syrian censorship committee would come in between just before putting together the programme. There were quite a few incidents of censorship. Dox Box was officially founded in 2008 and it is Syria’s oldest and the Arab World’s best-known professional documentary film festival. The festival’s aim was to bring creative documentaries to the Syrian audiences, and also attract the attention of talented young Syrian film-makers. As such it became one of the most important creative hubs in the Arab World, prior to the Syrian uprising. The Dox Box Festival was very much focused on Damascus and a growing urban young, somewhat elitist crowd that was forming around the festival, a young group of people who had the luxury to be involved in artistic activities, who enjoyed good, often higher, education and were able to speak English as well. This growing group of urban millennials, bonded not only over their love for documentaries and film-making but also in their wider interests in the environment, the history of their country and a general outlook and zest to life going beyond the daily grind of life in Syria. Most of them had travelled at least once outside of Syria and had been exposed to the outside world. The opening of internet and communication technology, using proxies, freed them from the institution of the old school cinema sector in Syria. This generation of youngsters could afford to order small cameras, which produced broadcast quality, such as the Canon 7D XLR cameras. They could form a small crew together, pretending to be tourists and circumventing any censorship authorities. They did not need a large crew of sorts. The young freelancers from Damascus called those older generation the ‘dinosaurs’. If they were not among the old masters of the NFO, the dinosaurs were working in Syrian National State Television, the dinosaurs most certainly were Ba’athists. Most of them had no idea about the digital revolution and the latest technological developments. Most of them did not speak English and thus had no access to the outside markets like these young urban millennials

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had. These young Damascus-based urban millennials experimented and came together on social events; some made short films, while others made reportage of real-life photography; all were doing documentary, documenting life as they saw and experienced it. The Dox Box Festival fitted in this group, it provided a platform for them. The Syrian government did not care much about these young urban millennials and their activities. They fitted the profile of Bashar al-Assad’s national policy to bring Syria into the new modern time with the social market economy. The Damascene elitist market was booming, most of these young urban millennials were not seen as a major threat to the regime. As one filmmaker of that generation confided in me, They probably thought we were a bit of a hippie like artistic group doing some hobby work. We also met at activities like the walks with Father Frans in Homs, the maseer. So we were not only filmmakers or photographers but also young people who cared about the environment and sustainability and such. We were quite a united bunch, few of us worked with international NGOs, as you know independent Syrian NGOs did not exist, except if it was under the supervision of the First Lady . . . like the Syria Trust, a so-called FLONGO, First Lady Organised NGO. Foreign newspapers and media agencies were not interested in Syria so we did not work with them before 2011. BBC had their correspondent, Lina Sinjab, she is Syrian and did most of the international media coverage about Syria as a television news reporter.60

Layla Abyad, a young Syrian film-maker, made several short documentaries and is now working on her first feature film called 5 Seasons of Revolution (2018) (working title) recounting her own personal experience of friendships and making choices on what to become during revolution and wartime, when to protest, document the events or flee the country. She has filmed herself in Homs when a dedicated group of young activists from Damascus decided to join protests there in 2012. The film is supported by the Doha Film Institute and produced by Orwa Nyrabia, Diana al Jeiroudi and their company No Nation Films, in Berlin, Germany. Layla collaborated with Nyrabia and Jeiroudi since the time of Dox Box and recalls the early years of the Dox Box Festival in Damascus: Before Dox Box, I watched documentaries and photography, which came only from journalists but when Dox Box was organised, myself and other young professionals were given an excellent chance to learn more, to become exposed to other kinds of documentaries, other than the standard National Geographic



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nature documentaries that we knew. It was very difficult to start a profession in documentary film in Syria because it was only possible of you had a wellconnected family. Dox Box provided an alternative to that. The public institutions in Syria had no interest whatsoever in documentary filmmaking. If it had not been for Dox Box, we would have not known there is more out there than BBC World or Wildlife documentaries. Dox Box showed us there was something called authorship and authored documentaries. This was so interesting for young professionals like me. Inside Syria there were no educational institutions for film. I wanted to focus on cinematography but within the documentary sector, not in fiction. There was really a lack of existence of documentary film, or new documentary film in Syria. I started to work together with young professionals in Syria. I was doing camerawork, I invested in a XLR camera, which was small but produced very good high quality digital video recordings.61

Layla and some of her friends were involved in activities within the Dox Box Festival but were also socially engaged, they organized aid work for homeless and displaced people in the Damascus countryside. This was a trend among the young urban Damascene professionals, not only to open up to the world but also to find a place in Syrian society where they could make a change and be meaningful to others. They started to organize each other in groups. An example of this was the emergence of the Street Foundation (Al-Share3) which was established in 2010 after the north-eastern Syrian al-Jazira region had been hit by several droughts in previous years, leading to a humanitarian crisis with over 160,000 internally displaced people in the country. The foundation launched a media campaign, including photography exhibitions and short movies, portraying the tragic conditions of the people of northeastern Syria. After a year of field work in refugee camps on the Iraqi borders, the Street Foundation, prompted by the outbreak of the Syrian uprising, expanded its work area to include the entire Syrian territory. From documenting hunger in drought camps, to documenting an uprising that hunger was a prime cause for, the foundation has come a long way since its beginnings, both in productivity and media tools. Today, the foundation is focusing on making documentaries and investigations, that reflects the Syrian reality, and states accurate and detailed information to the Syrian and International public.62

The brothers Amer and Mezar Matar were founders of the Street Foundation and carried out much of the organizational work for the camps, the aid deliveries and transportation, circumventing the authorities and the mukhabarat. The group started to go there every week in the summer of 2010. Every week the mukhabarat would come to check up on them, check their names but they were

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not doing something illegal, they were volunteering and carried out social work with the displaced. This was charity work. But some of them filmed the events once, which was a dangerous step. One of the group members of that time explains, ‘We were not regularly filming, it was not our thing but during the Eid, so we filmed it. If we had filmed every week, every time, we would have been in trouble much earlier. We kept doing this work until early 2011.’63 Since the first year of Dox Box, some of the group also volunteered with the festival, worked for Pro Action Film with Orwa and Diana, but many had to rely on freelance income. There were very few jobs around to make a living, so most of these young Syrians in Damascus relied on their families and worked from home, in advertising, photography, animation or graphic design. Most of these young aspiring film-makers were university graduates, aspiring to have their films published, or get a paid job or a scholarship abroad. The majority of this growing group were young professionals under thirty. Coming from uppermiddle-class families, most could afford their own XLR cameras. They had the luxury and time to explore, to attend international workshops if they were organized in Damascus, for example, through the UNDP or the Danish, Dutch, Finnish or French Institutes in Damascus. They had access to these international centres and they had time to explore the internet. The group of young urban professionals characterized itself as not very conservative, however, some coming from a conservative family. They came from a variety of backgrounds, Christian, Muslim, Alawite, Ismaeli, their religious and sectarian backgrounds did not matter to them. They hung out together in Damascus, where everything was happening. They were aware of an art scene in Aleppo, but for them, what they were doing was not only art, it had to be societal, it had to be useful and applied. When the Arab Spring was in full swing in Egypt and Tunisia, the same group of young urban Syrians felt inspired and thought of a variety of ways to voice their support for the Egyptian and the Libyan Revolution. In January 2011, some of their group organized a small demonstration, a lighting vigil, at the Egyptian Embassy. Some members were arrested when filming on the street, but since it was early in the beginning of the Syrian uprisings, often they were freed eventually. Their affluent backgrounds also helped. I was lucky to be arrested right in the start of the Syrian Revolution but it was my upper class background that helped me, it was over quite quickly without much damage. It was actually encouraging for me, I started to use the Internet more carefully. I created fake accounts and also had trust circle networks with people



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you never met before, we were all in the same groups. We started organising demonstrations outside of Damascus, as well. We also had contact with foreign press especially when Zabadani and other areas became liberated.64

Amer Matar and his friends of the Street Foundation also organized protests and started filming the events in Hama. This led to the first documentary made about the Syrian Revolution that came out of Syria, Smuggling 23 Revolutionary (2011). In twenty-two minutes, this short documentary tells the story of Hama before the entry of the Syrian Army. It follows the young protesters on their way to demonstrations, preparing banners in the night. Those young men had many of their relatives killed in the 1982 Hama massacre. An interview with a lady of the opposition in Hama reflects on the youth. She indicates that the older generation did not protest like that, with the songs and the funny chants. The older generation was stuck in certain statements that they had been repeating. So the youth brought a new spirit to the Syrian struggle. The protesters were deeply afraid to go out on the street. The film records the first protests at the Al-Assi square in Hama, it shows these were non-violent. There were children holding roses in the first two rows and pigeons were released. The protest passed by the Ba’ath Party building. That is when the regime started to shoot with live bullets, killing men, women and children randomly at the Al-Assi square. The older generation revolutionary lady tells the story of her incarceration and she realized there is no protection whatsoever for Syrian citizens. The young protesters explain, in distorted voice and not on screen, that they had congratulated each other after the protests by sending each other SMS messages saying ‘congratulations, it is broken.’ Everybody understood that this meant the barrier of fear was broken. The final sequence consists of footage taken from above the Al-Assi square showing the size of the demonstration, with the chants collective rising up from below, giving any spectator goosebumps. The film was broadcast on Al Arabiya Television and toured at festivals in Paris, Berlin and Brussels.65 On 29 April 2011, Orwa Nyrabia was instrumental in publishing a call from Syrian film-makers that stated that Syrian citizens were being killed for their basic demand of human rights and liberty. The call urged all filmmakers worldwide to denounce and expose these killings in solidarity with Syrian protesters.66 The call was undersigned by almost all Syrian film-makers and over a thousand film professionals worldwide. The 2012 Dox Box Festival that was scheduled to take place in Damascus, was cancelled in protest against the massacre of the Syrian people, but the following year, Dox Box curated a programme called ‘Citizen

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with a Movie Camera’ for the Dox Box Global Day. In this collection, which reached more than thirty-five cities around the world, the curators put together a collection of six thematic compilations of citizen videos, which were uploaded on YouTube as a tribute to the courage of the makers.67 Orwa was arrested in August 2012 at Damascus Airport, which prompted an international response. Many festivals expressed a grave concern about him and eventually he was released after a global petition that went viral and reached a lot of celebrities in support of giving him freedom. One of the people who was active in the charity work with the Street Foundation and had filmed some of their activities in 2010 was a young Syrian film-maker named Bassel Shehadeh who was a friend to many of the growing urban group of young professionals. The next chapter will be dedicated to his life and work as a documentary film-maker and activist.

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I remember, when I was arrested, I was telling myself . . . why am I here!? Because of Bassel! Bassel is now in the other life, and I am here, why!? Why, I am . . . . fuck him, why am I here!? For a person who is detained, you have time that you are totally frustrated and sometimes you are totally enthusiastic, you know, so especially in the early morning when you have a dream of your parents, and you wake up and you discover that you are living a nightmare, you are frustrated at the early morning, then by the later hours you start thinking differently. At the early morning, I was always angry and saying, what the fuck, why did I know him?? Fuck him. Fuck him. You know . . . HE wanted to be involved in this Revolution. HE should have gone by himself. What does it have to do with ME?! Then during the day, I told myself . . . No, come on, Bassel and other people gave their souls for this country, so what if I give just two or three months for that? – Bassel Shehadeh’s friend who was arrested and imprisoned during the Syrian Revolution after Shehadeh’s funeral.1

Introduction Through this chapter, I would like to bridge the era of Syrian documentary film prior to the Syrian Revolution with what happened after the popular uprisings. The work of one particularly talented young Syrian film-maker is important as his life and films form a bridge between the period prior to 2011 and the start of the Syrian Revolution. His name was Bassel Shehadeh, and his life and work are highlighted in this chapter. He was a young professional, under thirty and a fresh graduate in the last year of university when the Syrian Revolution started. I have decided to dedicate a chapter to him, his personal life and his film legacy because

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Bassel represents a Syrian generation of millennials from urban Damascus, a generation that spanned over a wider group of young professionals, more than just film-makers. Bassel personifies the spirit that many young, educated Syrians, mainly from Damascus, could identify with, during the first decade of the rule of Bashar al-Assad, representing an urban Syrian generation, upper middle class, educated and ready to open up for the rest of the world. Ready for a non-violent revolution. Bassel was a Christian from Damascus, a highly talented film-maker, who wanted to change his country and the world for the better and who left a legacy for generations to come. His unfortunate death in 2012 cut short a life full of challenges, opportunities and risks. He was killed in Homs while training young Syrian citizens in video production and filming his own documentary about freedom and revolution. In the early spring of 2012, I  sent around a language-coded message to many young film-makers, photographers and journalists I  knew from the media trainings that I  had given in Damascus in 2010. The Swedish Institute was inviting young professionals from the MENA (Middle East North African) region, in particular countries like Syria, to apply for a scholarship of six months to study at Lund University in Sweden for a course titled Social Innovation in a Digital Context (SIDC). This course was a great opportunity for professional development, and at the same time, it could offer some of these Syrian media professionals and journalists that I  knew a spot of safety and time for respite and contemplation. Some were still inside Syria and could be endangered. I also sent it to Bassel Shehadeh, whom I had met briefly in 2010 in Damascus. I never received a reply from him. It had been too late. On 28 May 2012, Bassel died in a mortar attack in Homs. One other film-maker, who I  was convinced would take up the offer, had initially replied positively but then on 12 June 2012, sent me this message: ‘Hi Joshka, sorry I did not reply earlier. I had already filled out the template and was just fishing for the email addresses online, when I heard the terrible news about Bassel. Then I  decided I  do not want a plan B.  Thank you very much for the opportunity, let’s hope no one needs it.’2 The film-maker in question had been a very good friend to Bassel before the revolution, and the reply indicated that this person was determined to continue the documentation work that Bassel started, giving up a chance to a scholarship abroad in Sweden, to safety. Bassel himself had done that in a similar fashion exactly a year before, when he did not continue his Fulbright scholarship to study film-making in the United States; he decided to stay in Syria, to be part of the Syrian Revolution.



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The death of Bassel in Homs in 2012 sent shockwaves through the young Syrian film-maker and activist community. Razan Ghazzawi, a well-known Syrian blogger who had always blogged under her real name, paid tribute to her friend in a blog post where she reminisced about how he organized a sit-in in front of the Egyptian Embassy:  You and I got closer when the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt started. Do you remember those days? We were alive again, no, we were born for the first time in our lives. Look at me smiling just by remember those days. Our time has come, we all knew it.3

Bassel’s death urged other young Syrian film-makers to stay and finish the work he had started, which was filming and documenting the ongoing Syrian Revolution. The film-maker who rejected my offer for the Swedish scholarship had started to work together with Bassel in the demonstrations and had done camerawork following the demonstrations in Damascus, Homs, Hama and eventually Aleppo. They had known each other since the charity work to internally displaced families from Hassakah in 2010. As part of this eclectic group of young urban professionals, Bassel had been a central figure in the organization of grass-roots media coverage of the Syrian Revolution from the start, using their XLR cameras. As one film-maker explains, Cinematography went out of the window. We all ended up doing things without clearly defined roles, it was quick and fast because the events happened so rapidly as well. We travelled through Syria, to the demonstrations, where we could. Because the checkpoints were not so fixed yet, we were able to avoid being arrested in the early days.4

Bassel Shehadeh was part of the group based in Damascus, experimenting and filming. He had been active in the group who brought aid to the internally displaced people from Hassakah. He also became involved in organizing and participating in the very first demonstrations such as the one held in front of the Egyptian Embassy in January 2011. The mukhabarat threatened to arrest Bassel, but it was a close call. At the same time, he learned he was accepted for a film study in the United States, but he initially refused to go. A friend of Bassel explains, He learned he had received the scholarship for a filmstudy in the US. His trip to the US was planned in September 2011 and he did not want to go because the Syrian uprisings had started. He thought he would miss out on the revolution. We had to literally drag him to Beirut airport because he did not want to go at

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all. We told him he had a very good opportunity for his education and he should go! No one expected that it would last two years, we had no idea it would last this long.5

Bassel’s youth Bassel grew up in an upper-middle-class Christian family in Damascus; his father was from Sweida and his mother from Tartus, and they had met during their university studies in Damascus. He had a younger brother and sister with whom he grew up in a single-parent family; his parents had separated when Bassel and his siblings were quite young. Bassel was not only the big brother, he was also the bigger male in the family. His brother describes his relationship with Bassel as follows: He took up the role of a father figure in the household. He always felt like a responsible person, for his younger brother and sister. My personal relationship with Bassel was a typical older brother-younger brother relationship, so it was a bit difficult at times, it had its positive sides and negative sides. Our parents are separated, not divorced, and we lived with our mother.6

He also described that when Bassel was young, he was already a bit of a rebel, for example, when he wanted a guitar, his mother could not afford this, so he borrowed one from a friend and learned to play the guitar by himself. He went to college and wanted to live by himself, which was something unusual in a traditional Syrian family. But despite this, Bassel went to live in the empty house of his maternal grandmother, to be alone and play his guitar music. His mother was concerned, she wanted him to be safe, his brother explains, but he did not care. ‘When it came to these personal things, Bassel’s relationship with his mother was sometimes a bit difficult.’7 Various childhood friends of Bassel remember his love for guitar and his gift for music. He played guitar on their trips to the countryside of Damascus. He sang in a band and wrote his own songs. He had gathered a group of friends around him in Damascus, who would play music, go out and enjoy their lives in the capital. In 2003 and 2004, music was such a passion for Bassel that he entered a song in a competition at the French Cultural Institute in Damascus and performed together with his little cousin on stage. One of the first video recordings of Bassel originates from this performance. One major activity that brought together many different young people from all over Syria including Bassel, was the annual hikes organized by a Dutch priest



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in Homs, Father Francis, Frans van der Lugt. In the 1980s, this Jesuit priest had established a community centre and farm, Al-Ard centre. The farm had gardens and vineyards, where people with various disabilities worked. From here, Father Francis organized the so-called desert and nature hikes. These hikes were formative for many whom participated.

Al Maseer and other adventures Father Frans, or Abouna Francis, came to Syria in 1966 and settled in Homs. There he established his monastic community and a farm. His mission was to promote and create a dialogue between Christians and Muslims and other people emphasizing humanity as a common ground. His commitment to the betterment of the community he lived in was unwavering. His legacy was the creation of a hike in nature, called Al Maseer. This was a group activity led by Abouna Francis, open for anyone, Christians, Muslims, atheists, any kind of religion. The goal was to embark upon a long walk of twenty to thirty kilometres per day, learn to work as a team, sharing laughter, pain, singing, making music, dancing and pushing each other’s limits and comfort zones.8 Bassel loved going on Abouna Francis’s hikes; during these hikes he enjoyed the nature, the environment and started to appreciate the history and heritage of his own country (see Figures 3.1 and 3.2, where Bassel enjoys the hikes in Homs). One of Bassel’s childhood friends recounts the hikes with Francis as follows9: We walked Abouna Francis’s hikes around four or five times per year and one big one in summer. There were maybe 150 to 250 young people from all over Syria who participated. Every 3 to 4 months we would spend the weekend in Homs. The big one in summer was nine days. Every year, there were new people and it was growing. The masir was open to every Syrian. During the hikes, Father Francis encouraged conversation among each other. It became a conversation of love, love and respect for each other and love for the environment, for nature. There was a sort of freedom that we felt during these hikes, we were all quite young, in our 20s, so it was a great feeling. We walked in the nature and there was always something special in summer. For example, we would see archaeological sites near Homs or we would go far to the east to Deir Ezzor and visit archaeological sites there. It was great, I learned a lot from my own country during these trips. I did not go to all these places with my school. Through Father Francis’s hikes, I learned from the history of my own country. We also went all the way to Idlib.

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Figure 3.1  Bassel during one of the Maseer Hikes in Syria © F. Deeb. It was not just the area but also other people from my own country with whom we came together. These hikes were why Bassel became interested in history and wanted to study archaeology and architecture.

In 2006, Bassel finished his computer science degree at Damascus University, and he started to work for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Unusual in Damascus, he bought a bicycle to ride to his work. Moreover, he had bought the bicycle to go on a trip, beyond his daily routine to work. In the summer of 2009, he went to tour Syria on his bicycle by himself and decided to leave his job at the UNDP. The only thing he shared among his friends on Facebook was that he was going on a cycling trip. He had named



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Figure 3.2  Bassel with friends during a hike © F. Deeb.

his bicycle ‘Abdelmoneim’. He set off and went touring Syria for ten days; he started in Deir Mar Musa, went to the monastery of Saydnaya, visited Qalat Hosn, the archaeological site of Aphamea, Idlib, the dead cities of Sergilia and on to Aleppo. In Aleppo, he took the bus back to Damascus. During the tour, he took photographs which he uploaded on his Facebook page so his friends could follow his trip. The photographs were always artistic and visually stunning. He had a solo tent and he slept in nature. He was completely by himself, which was exceptional for a young Syrian man. His friends recounted that it was fun to follow him and his tour on Facebook. His photographs and updates were shared a lot among his friends and soon he became quite well known among the young urban professionals as this special person who was a bit of a rebel.

Bassel’s activism and film-making Bassel made his reputation of being a bit of a rebel among his friends, who admired his attitude to life and, somehow, were a little jealous that he took these

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liberties, that he did not care about conventions. He was also someone who would break taboos. One of his good friends recalls him: Let me tell you something, Bassel was a strange person and this is what I liked about him, you know. I remember we used to go for a drink together and go to events, musical concerts and other activities together in Damascus. One day, he said something, I remember, that he remembered when his father woke up at night and he started to beat his mother. For us, we used to live in a typical Christian community. You start your life, you study something good, then you work in the public sector and you have your own job, then you get married and you have children, very typical. Then there are some things that you should not ever speak about. Especially domestic violence and gender-based violence or, well, we can speak about it but we do not speak about our families to someone from outside. Then when he mentioned that, we usually do not speak about that. But he had the courage to mention that! I remember that also I had the same problem with my family, but I did not talk about that, it was a shame to talk about that. But he said, yes, we have a problem, why don’t we admit that. Why should we be idealistic about our families? This, I remember from him. He used to speak about environmental issues, about musical issues, about sexual issues, about family issues. He was totally different. For us, he wanted to do something different than the rest of us. Not the regular things. He did not want to stay in this typical bourgeois life. This is what made Bassel really different from the rest.10

Bassel loved exploring and being in nature and was deeply interested in environmental issues; he expressed his environmental activism with songs he wrote about the environment. In October 2012, a good friend of Bassel uploaded the song Bassel had written in 2006, sung by his cousin Lara Salama, which describes the harm that humans have done to nature, where there is no tomorrow left if we close our eyes to this, and only walls of cement and smoke will be our future.11 Before the uprisings, Bassel volunteered in several reforestation campaigns, participated in rehabilitating urban parks, visiting schools to talk about separating waste and taking care of the environment. He engaged in various humanitarian actions for orphans and displaced refugees from Lebanon after the 2006 war. By 2009, Bassel’s love for travelling, photography and art soon merged into a passion for film-making. He experimented with short films and recordings such as I Dream of my Home (2009), which was a recording of a song Bassel wrote, sung by his little cousin, recordings from a balloon during a trip to Kappadocia in Turkey, and Reading Workshop (2010), the latter being a short recording of



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a reading workshop in Damascus held by the Syrian writer Khaled Khalifa.12 Carrying Eid to Camps (2010) was another early short film by Bassel Shehadeh, which documented the charity and aid work that Bassel and a couple of his friends, among others the Matar brothers of Al Shara3 foundation, carried out for the internally displaced people from Hassakah, who had camped out around Damascus because of the droughts in the north-east of the country. Bassel was affected by the humanitarian plea. He started humanitarian work for the internally displaced with a small group of people from Damascus, students and young professionals. Basil had started filming with his new D7 XLR camera. It was a bit dangerous to film in these ad hoc camps for internally displaced people, because the secret services did not want any Syrian to know about these people and certainly they would not allow filming. The Syrian government at the time denied there was any problem of droughts and displacement of people. The group of youngsters did the aid work clandestinely. His short film for the application of a Fulbright scholarship was called Saturday Morning Gift (2010). He had been looking for a subject and decided it would be about the war in Lebanon. His cousin Ziad was the child protagonist in the film, filmed in his aunt’s house. The film took a prize in 2013 in Holland posthumously, but first got him the Fulbright scholarship to the United States, to start in 2011. The film was done at the beginning of 2010 and he had heard he received the scholarship before the end of 2010. In the same year, Bassel bought a motorbike and wanted to go on a long travel. When his friend asked him where he wanted to go, he said, ‘I don’t know, Turkey maybe.’13 When he received the news about the Fulbright scholarship, he decided to do his motorbike trip. His close friend remembers it: Every two days or so, he posted a photo on Facebook, we didn’t know where he was exactly going. We certainly didn’t expect that he was going all the way to India. He was going through Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and then eventually India. He used to put a photograph of everything and a little accompanying paragraph. In Iran, he had a traffic accident, he hurt his arm. He thought to end the trip there and go back, but he continued and he went all the way to India. From India, he went to Dubai to his sister and then he came back to Syria. There is a nice little quote from this trip, which shows what type of personality he had. He went by mistake into Afghanistan from his way of Iran. There he met a local shaykh. They didn’t know that he was Christian. They thought he was an imam, because he was from Syria. So he went in front of them to lead the Muslim prayer. He had no clue what to do. But he was doing something anyway. But of course not the right way at all. When the Afghanis were asking

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afterwards. He said ‘This is how we do it in Syria!’ It was very funny. This was typical Bassel.14

When Bassel returned from his motorbike trip, street demos and vigils had started to be organized, and Bassel participated in them. He eventually did leave for the United States to take up his Fulbright scholarship, but that did not last long; he returned to Syria before the end of 2011. He eventually chose to go to Homs and train activists there on how to produce videos to document the revolutionary protests and the atrocities being done by the regime. Friends helped Bassel to organize transporting data and videos from Homs. Bassel was personally committed to making the Syrian popular uprisings a success. He was full of energy and sometimes it was difficult to hold him back. His brother recounts that early period of the uprisings: We had our differences. We fought once, ha, ha. In the beginning, he was an emotional person, I tried to discuss something about the sectarian side of the problem and I meant to say that it is one of our problems, not to ignore it and he was quite a bit emotional so we got into a small fight . . . But I was not with him in Homs, I stayed in Damascus. Back then, there were no military checkpoints in Damascus so it was not so dangerous in Damascus. . . . Before he was in Homs, he worked on a news report about the appearance of the Freedom Money in Damascus. They had 1000 lira notes, fake, and at the back it called people to protest and civil disobedience.15

In the film made about his life, based on the footage that was recovered from Syria, Syria through a Lens – The Life and Works of Filmmaker Bassel Shehadeh (2012), the interview with Bassel at Democracy Now! is recorded, and Bassel explains that the Syrian Revolution started peacefully and should be carried on as such, despite the defections and the forming of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). In the film, he says, ‘We are trying to establish a society and a movement that could face any despotism and any tyrant.’ He also organized non-violent direct actions such as the Freedom Money Campaign, where young pro-democracy activists had printed fake 100 Syrian lira notes to distribute, where they had put revolutionary slogans and calls to protests. This direct action was covered by MBC news media in 2012 where Bassel was interviewed anonymously.16 The group of Syrian activists that carried out the Freedom Money campaign, had been inspired by a Lebanese group of environmental activists who had used this same non-violent tactic in Lebanon. In the early days of the street protests against the Assad regime, before the spark of the revolution in Dera’a on 15 March, young urban activists were full



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of hope and anxiety. They were strong in their resolve and really thought their actions would lead to the downfall of the Syrian regime. They were briefly arrested by the mukhabarat but not for long, so they started to feel somehow invincible. Bassel’s fellow activist remembers, In 2011, I was arrested. I was arrested in the beginning during the demos like any other Syrian who participated. I  was in jail for one month. There were beatings, humiliation and torture. After two weeks I confessed and gave them all fake names. After one month the prison was too crowded and they had to let people go. There was no death under torture on a widespread scale yet, like it is now. It was not yet so bad.   One time we organized a demo together in Bab Sharqi in Damascus. That was before he went to Homs. At the beginning of the revolution, we were emotionally strong, we did not have that kind of fear of the regime. The atmosphere was different back then. Like, it did not happen suddenly, so after I  got arrested, I  tried to do things that were a bit more secret, but we still continued.   . . . It was difficult. I did not know at first glance, what to think. We saw what happened in Egypt and Tunisia, and I started to think about this stuff a bit and the first weeks of 2011, I  started to read a lot what is going on and why it is happening so and we began to discuss these things in college, not whispering, it was incredible to discuss these things and after two three week to actually do something.   Bassel was like, he did not care about the sectarianism and the social problems that we have. He said we have a priority now, we have to do these things and all other things we can deal with these problems later. I saw that the sectarianism was a problem but I did not think that it would go to a massacre of the people. I was shocked when I heard the first airplane.   Until now, I am not allowing myself to say, ‘yes, forwards’, I am standing with the people, I am trying to help as much as I can, I did my maximum when I was there. But I could not say back then, go forward, go to your death. I can’t say that, I am not living in Douma, or in Aleppo. I do not encourage anyone to go to his death. No.   I think the part in Homs that got Bassel interested was that the city was very mixed and had many religious parties. The sectarian problem was obvious there and it became to getting weapons and to change to a Salafi way of thinking. Many young people changed that way. He was interested why these young people are changing their minds to these ways of thinking. They are thinking too much of paradise and stuff and their weapons are taking control of them. But when he was there, many of these young people became friends with him. They told him

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a lot of personal stories. I do not think he was influenced or that they tried to convert him, he was too sarcastic for that!17

His brother explained that Bassel wanted to experience, understand and film how people in Homs were dealing with the extreme violence that was inflicted upon them, why they were forced to take up violence as a solution. He wanted to expose the regime’s media narratives that Christians in Homs were subjected to Islamic laws, threatened by extremist groups and forced out of the city. None of these narratives were true, and Bassel saw it as his mission to use his camera as a weapon to expose the truth. He believed deeply in the power of non-violence himself, and his entire focus was on using his camera to defeat the regime. He believed his documentary film work and training of other activists in video production would bring about social change. According to his friend, he had always been this kind of rebel: As a Christian, he felt it was his obligation to participate in this upcoming revolution. He had talked about it with some of his friends, how they could convince other Christian Syrians to join in the revolution. At that moment we were talking about the revolution, for a modern change. We wanted to do something, as a revolution for all Syrians. Including the Christians. I remember in June 2011, he told me, why do we not do something? There is a kind of a mass, a service in Al Salib Church, in Al Qasaa, in Damascus. They were going to pray for peace. So we were speaking with 30–40 people, Christian friends, to do something. Not all Christians are supporting the regime, you know, they are in favour of change, so we wanted to show ourselves. I remember it was 23 of June, on a Thursday, and we went there and they brought some Christian famous people there, they brought George Wassouf, and then they started singing ‘bi’rruh bi’d-dam nefdik ya Bashar’ meaning ‘we will sacrifice our soul and blood for you Bashar’! And they pray and such, and we have a kind of priest, I forgot his name, some local khoury and he is more than shabih, and he was shouting, ‘We are supporting Assad.’ I remember that moment, I stood next to the exit of the church, and there were sort of clashes, maybe one kilometer away in Ain Tarma.   The church is in Al Qasaa, so it is just one kilometer and I remember a person, who was wearing some Muslim dress, maybe he was from that area, I remember I  looked at him while he was passing the church, and he was looking like he was saying, how come that people like you are celebrating, while other people are killed just one kilometer far away from here? So after this, we wanted to do something and Bassel said, ‘let’s go to the Jesuits!’. They have kind of meetings, you know, for anti-regime Christians. I remember we met with many of them. We wanted to do something different. We wanted to show that we have our



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opinion . . . We organized small activities. Each of us had our own network of students and friends to do something small. Not so big, Bassel was also involved in the demonstration in Midan on Wednesday July 13th in 2011 with May Skaf and Rima Fleihan to show that the revolution was more than just a revolution of the lower class, as the regime wanted to portray it, but we wanted to show something else, so there were many high-profile people. But they were all arrested, also famous filmdirectors Nabil Maleh and Mohammed Malas, together with 30 other people, including Bassel. He was set free after 2 or 3 days. Then he stayed a couple of weeks in Damascus and he went to Beirut and to the US, but he came back before the end of the year. When he came back he was saying, ‘how come that now the real revolution started and I went to the US?!’. He felt guilty at that moment.18

For many of Bassel’s peers, going to an anti-regime demonstration for the first time was a seminal moment in their lives. For years they had lived in fear of the regime and now they saw an opportunity to say something. Hearing their own voices during the demonstrations felt liberating. When the regime started its crackdown and their friends were killed, some became scared, but by staying at home, feelings of guilt started to emerge whereby they felt as if they were benefiting from the blood of their peers. Staying at home or going to a demonstration was a daily dilemma for many of Bassel’s peers in the early phase of the Syrian Revolution. One fellow demonstrator with Bassel describes these dilemmas as follows: I was afraid but I  wanted to say something, I  don’t know how that works psychologically, I  was afraid yes, but I  want to say something myself. I  felt guilty if I depended on others to say something or to demonstrate and then I get the benefit of their blood, you know. If I stay in my house and the change comes because of the blood of those people? And I am in my house! If all of us stayed in our house, no one will go to the street and ask for freedom. We felt ashamed to stay in the house and Bassel and other people, many of them felt the same.19

However, when the regime crackdown became much stronger and the violence that entered the revolution radicalized young Syrians who took up arms, this was another dilemma for Bassel’s peers. Most of them were secular pacifists and did not want to resort to counter-violence. They identified as non-violent protesters and had not much affinity with the hardened, more religiously motivated youth in the demonstrations in, for example, Homs and Dera’a. This posed a new dilemma of conscience.

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For me, for my perspective, because things were going very bad, especially in Homs, I  remember that for example some anti-government people stopped a service mini-bus, they separated the men and women and then they killed the men, because they were Alawi. At that moment, I remember I met Bassel and I told him, ‘listen is this the Revolution that we started with? Is this a Revolution?’ He answered me. He said, ‘If you are staying in your house, and he is staying in his house, who is going to stay in the street? Who is going to take over, if the seculars do not come out of their houses? If you want to have a nice and beautiful revolution, come and go out on the streets and participate, if you want to have a kind revolution without violence’. When Bassel was killed, I remember these words. I think the regime knows very well how to put and push the highly educated people and intellectuals to be aside, away from the streets, away from the Revolution. Because when they are gone, the regime has the justification to use violence.20

Bassel was caring, and most of the people around him describe him as loving and gentle of character. Together with some of his activist friends, Bassel started to go two or three times per week to Homs, to train activists and join the demonstrations. They could navigate the checkpoints and with some of the friends from Homs, had a good knowledge of the area. Bassel worked hard and was fully dedicated to training the local youth of Homs in video production (see Figure 3.3). When he came to Homs, he encountered new young protesters, different than his friends from Damascus. For the protesters in Homs, the fact that someone from Damascus would come to Homs in solidarity with the revolution was a special thing. Bassel’s friend Fadi, from Homs, explains how Bassel was received by the young revolutionaries from Homs:  The old city of Homs was a conservative place. He was also from another religion. Like Fadwa Suleimani, the actress who is Alawite, she joined the demonstrations in Homs. It was something beautiful that time, we were all together, it did not matter which religion you were from. Bassel played a role in breaking the stereotypes and showing solidarity with the Revolution. He wanted to do good, he wanted to be as clean as possible. He was a very loveable person who wanted a good future for his country. I don’t know what he would think about the Revolution now. He was quite upset by the violence but also he saw we were in a Revolution.21

Fadi tells me that Bassel, just days before his death, had talked about wanting to go back to the United States and finish his film education, maybe start a family and that his children and Fadi’s children could play together in the new Syria of the future.



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Figure 3.3  Bassel filming in Syria. Courtesy: F. Deeb.

Death of a young revolutionary film-maker The last time I spoke to him was in April 2012. The day before he was killed, on 28th May, I chatted with him on Facebook. I told him about the Houla massacre, which had happened just days before. About a hundred Sunni villagers were killed. But he told me he had no time to chat, he had to run and film. The day after, he got killed.22

The day Bassel died, it sent shockwaves through the entire Syrian activist community, both inside Homs, in Damascus and abroad. Social media messages went back and forth, activists were warned not to go to Homs or his mother’s house in Damascus because the regime had started arresting anyone who wanted to pay tribute to Bassel. Friends abroad noticed his Facebook profile went black and his close friends started to give condolences on social media. His brother was in Damascus with their mother and recounts the moment they were notified of Bassel’s death, A man called Abu Raqqan called my mother. I think it was around 10 o’clock in the night. I was studying in my room. My mother did not speak. She lowered the phone and gave it to me. I heard him say, ‘Your brother got killed’. I did not

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believe him. I  called a friend, she was working with Bassel. She was going to check. Not long after, she called me back and confirmed. I went crazy. I was so devastated by the news. We had a big discussion in our house. What to do? He was wanted by the regime. So we did not want them to take or confiscate his body or something. We called the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) and we had a lot of discussions. We came to Homs the next day and we decided to leave his body there. Abouna Francis was with us. He lived in Hamidiyyeh. I was not there with the burial, we had to leave the city because the area was being shelled. Father Frans buried him in the cemetery of Hamidiyyeh.23

On the day he died, Bassel was with four other activists in a car when one of the tyres had to be changed. Bassel wanted to carry on and they all got out of the car. Four of them walked into the street, while Fadi, his friend, stayed behind with the car. He watched them as a mortar grenade was fired into the group of four. In one go, he remembers, they all died in an instant.24 The burial took place the next day, together with three others who got killed with Bassel. The burial united all activists from Homs, the Islamists, the youth, the secular activists and the group around Abouna Francis. The day after, the long siege of Homs started. But Fadi, his friend, was devastated and decided to leave Syria. After Bassel got killed I went out of Syria as quick as possible. I did not want to stay. I had seen people killed but this was the first time someone so close to me got killed so I wanted out. I hated the place. I left for Jordan, worked there. Then Lebanon, Egypt and Istanbul. I went back to Syria only in 2013, then I entered Syria from the north from Turkey.25

Fadi continued working as a news cameraman for foreign broadcasters and covered the Syrian war from the north. Bassel is buried in Homs, because the Greek Catholic church in Damascus was not allowed or, rather, was advised by the regime, not to receive his body. The UNDP and ICRC could not guarantee that his body would come through the checkpoints and reach Damascus. Different people from all over Syria came to Homs. He was buried there on 30 May 2012. Only a small group of friends and close relatives were present at the burial. The next day, on Thursday 31 May, there was a funeral ceremony or mass that was to be held in Damascus. But there were problems, as Bassel’s friend explains, The mass was cancelled. It was a play by the regime. After Bassel was killed in Homs, there was an approval to conduct a mass in the Greek Catholic Church in Al Qasaa, his neighbourhood in Damascus. One or two hours before that, there was a small meeting between the parents of Bassel and an officer from the



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Airforce Intelligence. He said ‘Ok, of course you can do a service in the church, this is your decision, but I cannot ensure that maybe a person comes and bombs himself next to the church, I cannot guarantee anything.26

His parents decided to cancel the mass. Despite the cancellation, many people came to the church from different cities in Syria. There were people from many different backgrounds, from different groups and religions; they had brought musicians and musical instruments and were standing next to the church. However, the ceremony was under close surveillance. His friend recalls the events: The regime had bussed in military troops and regime supporters. They were shouting to the crowd that the Shabihha [Assad’s militia] were hungry, they wanted to eat. Then the crowd started praying on the street. A Christian prayer first and then someone started an Islamic prayer. The crowd started to pray ‘Our Father’ and then [sang] the national anthem of the Syrian Arab Republic. But the regime agents were not having it. The secret police started running towards us and we started running, it was a kind of mess. We went to the house of Bassel, which is like 7 or 8 minutes away from the church.27

Bassel’s friends were arrested and put into prison for a month; one recalls how they were tortured and beaten, blindfolded and isolated; it was like a concentration camp. Some of them recount that apparently Bassel was known to some of the interrogators. Most of the friends were released but had lost many kilos of weight and were heavily traumatized by their experiences. Those who were Christian, though, faced another problem: the stigmatization by their own communities. Some of them came from Christian families who were supportive of the regime and blamed them for being arrested. They insulted the ex-prisoners and did not talk about the arrest and imprisonment as it brought shame to the family. The Dutch Jesuit priest Abouna Francis, Frans van der Lugt, in Homs, who had been a great inspiration for Bassel, remained in besieged Homs after the death of Bassel. Besieged by Syrian government forces, van der Lugt stayed in his house beside the church in the city centre of Homs. He cared for the sick, hungry, aged and wounded. In 2014, the siege reached a breaking point and he declined the UN evacuation of citizens from the besieged area. In February of that year, he had posted a couple of YouTube videos through the opposition channels to plead for the lifting of the siege, representing the Christian community in the besieged areas of the old city of Homs.28 These video pleas gained a lot of media attention worldwide and did not sit well with the regime. An assassination to

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be blamed on the rebels was very convenient for the regime. Abouna Francis was assassinated by an unknown masked, armed individual on 7 April 2014. The Syrian regime officials of Homs were quick to state that Abouna Francis was killed by al-Qaeda-related terrorists of Jabhat al-Nusra. However, the opposition and FSA adamantly denied that he was killed by terrorists, and no jihadi group had claimed the killing. Abouna Francis was killed by one single person who walked into the monastery, took him outside and shot him through the head twice and left. He was assassinated. The person who killed him knew whom he was killing. If it would be Jabhat al-Nusra, they would have also killed the remaining other Christians in the besieged area. The only party that had an advantage of the murder of Abouna Francis was the regime. Therefore, opposition sources blamed the Syrian government for his death. But it is widely believed that Abouna Francis was killed by hard-line Islamist members of one of the rebel factions that have taken control of his Bustan al-Diwan neighbourhood in Homs. No international investigation of the murder of Father Frans was ever conducted. Many young Syrians, who were from the same generation and group of people that had met each other during the hikes organized by Abouna Francis, are now living outside Syria. These young Syrians have started to organize Abouna Francis’s Al Maseer walks again. Until now, these Syrians have organized two hikes in 2016 and 2017, one in Germany and another one in the Netherlands. Both Abouna Francis and Bassel became inspirations for Syrian youth. I think of Bassel as a person who influenced me a lot. He was not going to conform to anything, he always had been a rebel . . . It was natural that he got involved in the Syrian Revolution. So he died in his armor. But I miss him very much. We do the Abouna Francis hikes now to commemorate the Jesuit Father Francis who got killed in April 2014. He was a very important person for many young Syrians.29

Tributes and posthumous films When Bassel died on 28 May 2012, the internet went viral with tributes and audiovisual impressions by his friends from all over Syria and internationally. His close friends uploaded some of the material he was working on at the time of his death. On 29 May, a tribute Singing to Freedom (2012) was immediately uploaded. It consists of photographs of Bassel, during the revolutionary protests,



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of his hiking trips and travels with a Fairouz song as background audio. The YouTube caption says, ‘Bassel was an immensely talented young man, with energy and enthusiasm and a joy for life. He was always smiling and always ready to help with projects, and truly believed in solidarity through the arts.’30 More tributes followed in a similar fashion in the days immediately after his death. One upload is important in this sense. On 4 June 2012, Bassel’s closest friends uploaded a video called Songs to Freedom:  Bassel Shahadeh’ featuring Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Amy Goodman, Erica Chenoweth and Syrian Protesters (2012). It was one of the last films Bassel had been working on. Before he died, another version of the film, under the title Singing to Freedom, a Film about the Syrian Uprising (2011), was uploaded anonymously on 28 December 2011 and ended with the phrase, ‘A film by Syrian protesters’.31 Songs to Freedom is a road movie about non-violence and revolutions that Bassel had started when he was studying in Syracuse, New York. For those months, he managed to interview major academics and thinkers on the topic of non-violent protests and civil disobedience. The film also contains the message from Razan Zaitouneh in hiding calling for freedom and change in Syria.32 A month later, on 3 July 2012, another upload with the same film was done by a close friend of Bassel who provides the narrated voice-over that is added to the films (with distorted voice). Syria through a Lens: The Life and Works of Filmmaker Bassel Shehadeh (2012) is a compilation of Bassel’s films, as a tribute to the life and works of Bassel. This film was used for outreach and screening throughout Europe.33 About a year later, on 16 April 2013, Kayani Web TV uploaded the film Streets of Freedom (2013). This was the very last film that Bassel was working on at the time of his death. It had been located on the restored and saved hard disk that his friend brought to Lebanon.34 In the first two minutes of the film, Bassel films the wall at the school in Dera’a where children wrote graffiti against the regime. A protester explains how they wrote the slogans again when the regime left Dera’a. Another man explains that they do not want to live as slaves anymore. Footage shot in Damascus’s city centre of checkpoints forms the backdrop of the intro. The original title comes up, ‘Our Street: The Celebration of Freedom’. This film is a testimony of the first weeks and months of protests against the Assad regime and tells the stories of various activists in different Syrian cities, Damascus, Dera’a, Salamiyyeh, Hama and Homs. Their faces half in the shot to protect their identities, activists talk about their feelings of rejoice and elation during these first protests. They explain how protesters were shot at with live bullets, how regime forces attacked the Omari

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mosque in Dera’a and killed unarmed people inside the mosque, which enraged protesters even more. He interviews protesters in Homs, narrating the story of the massive sit-ins at the clock square and how the crowds broke the wall of fear. Through mobile-phone video footage, the film shows how the regime killed peaceful protesters in Hama, who were shouting, ‘peaceful, peaceful’. The film turns to the moment that regime army battalions defected and formed the FSA to protect the protesters. Bassel interviews protesters who describe how they enjoy the freedom of talking and their belief in the success of the revolution, despite all the violence. The film was eventually broadcast on Al Arabiya TV. Other films that emerged posthumously from Bassel were Merry Christmas Homs (2012) and I Will Cross Tomorrow (2012). His girlfriend, herself a filmmaker and journalist, also posted posthumously films made by Bassel, using previously unseen footage shot by him, for example, A Year of Absence (2013) and A Memory of Forgetfulness (2011) which is an experimental film that he made in 2011 while studying at Syracuse University in New York. The film was inspired by Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness. In the film #chicagoGirl: The Social Network Takes on a Dictator (2013), Bassel’s camerawork and cinematography are used for many of the scenes recorded in Homs. The film starts with shaky footage from warzone Homs; Bassel is holding the camera and walking fast behind an activist guiding him. They have to cross a street with snipers. We hear Bassel breathing heavily, increasing his pace, he is scared, runs for his life. Bassel is running to safety, the activist is asking him, did you film it? ‘Be patient’, Bassel responds. Then we hear an explosion very close, Bassel runs towards an alley into a doorway to safety, all the while filming and recording. He stops running, is utterly out of breath. The activist tells him to look behind, quickly. Then the camera pans to the right, and a thick cloud of smoke and dust from an explosion is visible in the street just a couple of meters away. ‘Film it! Film it!’ the activist tells Bassel. Bassel has just escaped death. We hear him out of breath behind the camera, relieved that he made it. Just about. Bassel tells the activist, ‘It was only meters away. I felt the pressure on my back!’ The film tells the story of a nineteen-year-old American student named Ala’a Basatneh, born in Damascus, who helped to coordinate the Syrian Revolution via social media from Chicago since 2011. She was coordinating with hundreds of activists and media makers on the ground, including Bassel. She organized demonstrations as Facebook events, including escape routes using Google Maps, and afterwards she uploaded the videos shot by demonstrators. One of the people she was in close contact with was Mazhar (Omar) Tayara, a well-known and extremely smart anti-regime protester from Homs. He was a twenty-three-year-old



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student of architecture. Mazhar had a passion for the French language, also spoke English well and was a friend of Bassel. He was part of the organization of the first mixed Muslim and Christian protests in Homs. Because of his language ability and networks, Mazhar started filming and covering the protests in Homs for outlets such as Avaaz and for French, English and American papers and news channels. Mazhar got killed in Homs during a regime shelling on 4 February 2012. Like Bassel, Mazhar was a bright young high-potential student, who gave up everything for the Syrian Revolution for freedom. Ala’a was also in close contact with Bassel Shehadeh when he was in Damascus and Homs. In the film, we see Bassel interviewing a major figure in the organization of anti-regime protests in Damascus, Aous Al Mubarak, a twenty-six-year-old dentistry student. Bassel is introduced in the film as one of the very famous activists known inside Syria. Ala’a explains that Bassel chose to fight the revolution with a camera instead of an AK-47. The film then narrates the story of the internet in the Syrian Revolution, liking it to the importance and role of the printing press in past revolutions as a critical element. Assigning a major function and role to social media as powerful enough to bring down years of dictatorship and introduce democracy, Ala’a uses many different internet tools such as twitter, Facebook, Google maps, Skype and Whatsapp to help coordinate the protests inside Syria. The very first protest that a small group of young people from Damascus was involved in was a vigil in front of the Egyptian embassy on 29 January in 2011. Bassel was part of the organization of protests from the very beginning. The film shows how Bassel and Aous share the same apartment, while Bassel is filming Aous in Damascus during the organization of protests. Aous contemplates where to go, assesses how many informants from the regime would be there and makes decisions on where to organize a next protest. Aous regularly communicates with Ala’a in Chicago to assess where it is best to link groups of protesters together to get bigger crowds. Bassel’s camerawork in this film is intimate and sensitive. Capturing children playing on the street outside, while Aous is preparing himself to go outside. Aous is combing his hair and tells Bassel that he did not cut his hair since 15 March, the beginning of the Syrian Revolution. He has it long now and will not cut it until the Assad regime has fallen. The camerawork is close, personal and reflects the close revolutionary friendship between Bassel and Aous. A close-up of a folded revolutionary flag reveals that Aous is ready to a demonstration. Aous picks it up and tucks the flag in his pants so it will not be visible to the regime checkpoints. He advises Bassel to put a flag over his face during the protests, so he will not be recognized. Bassel tells Aous that he feels something

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will happen today, like a sort of confrontation. They are on their way to Midan neighbourhood of Damascus. We then see Aous, without scarf and recognizable, clapping his hands in the protest singing ‘Bashar is no longer useful. It is time for Syrians to do better’ and ‘Freedom! Freedom! In spite of you, Assad!’ Then suddenly a gunshot is heard. The demonstration is dispersed. Bassel keeps his camera running, while running himself. Then the film focuses on the role of Ala’a in protecting the protesters’ on-line presence from her bedroom in Chicago. Once protesters were arrested, she deactivated their accounts. So the regime would not be able to find out their passwords and access their social networks. This is the conundrum of the use of social media in anti-regime protests. Social media is an incredibly powerful and rapid tool to organize protests against authoritarian states in an efficient manner but can also give the regime a powerful tool to carry out surveillance. Once Syrian protesters were arrested, they could be tortured to give away their passwords for social media accounts, which then gave the regime access to a wide network of protesters whom they could then start arresting. During the first protest that Bassel filmed in Midan, Aous and he got separated. Bassel filmed when he was back in Aous’s home. He asked him where he went. Aous threw stones at two mukhabarat agents but there was a tank behind them, so he ran. Bassel had returned to film again. In this scene, we notice the resilience and passion of Bassel, who checks with Aous whether there will be protests again in the neighbourhood. ‘Are we doing this again tomorrow? We will go down and film it tomorrow, no?’ he asks Aous, eagerly. Aous confirms. Bassel was not afraid; he did not show hesitation to get up and fight the regime again on his own terms despite the mortal dangers. The regime forces on the other hand, were specifically targeting young Syrians with cell phones and cameras on the ground. The Assad regime had already banned all foreign media access, but the emergence of video activism was a particularly challenging problem for the regime. The video activists were seen as a major threat, because even dictators, like Bashar al-Assad, do not want to be seen to be murdering their own people. Bassel and Aous were hoping that their coverage of protests in Damascus would reach international media outlets. Aous explains that in their filming they focused on the number of protesters, they show a landmark of the protest location that is recognizable, they state the date and time of the protests and they take care not to show the faces of the protesters, out of security considerations. The videos would be uploaded and spread quickly on YouTube. With the internet and the support from human social media ‘hubs’ like Ala’a in Chicago, the Syrian protesters and video activists made it impossible for the world to deny what was



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going on. Nevertheless, Bashar al-Assad consistently denied all wrongdoing in his interviews with Western press and his supporters kept designating the videos as fakes, right up to today. Eventually, when the FSA was formed out of defected Syrian Army forces, and the FSA started to protect the protesters at demonstrations in Homs, the Assad regime reacted with a full force assault in the beginning of 2012 with heavy shelling of the revolutionary neighbourhoods. This is when Bassel was urged to enter into Homs and form part of the video activist network there. This was extremely dangerous, but he felt he needed to do something. He started to film with Khaled in Homs, who livestreamed the shellings on Bambuser. In one of the scenes of the film shot by Bassel, we see Khaled sitting in an empty street, connecting his laptop online and there is a shelling some 200 metres away from them. Bassel keeps filming. Khaled keeps typing on his laptop, set up at a distance to livestream the shelling. We also see the livestream on Bambuser and Khaled asking, ‘Missiles are raining down on us. How long will the world be silent for? Where is the Red Crescent? Where is the Red Cross? The United Nations!?’ Bassel also films with a video activist from Homs, named Hussam. He explains that the world does not believe them so the only thing they can do is to film it. In the footage we see them cross the streets that are targeted by snipers. A third person is an unnamed female video activist. Together they visit a shelled and destroyed hospital and are taken by Hussam to an underground field clinic. Eventually Bassel manages to smuggle out the footage that he shot in Homs to Damascus for it to be uploaded and sent abroad for the international media. He hoped that with this evidence, the international community would react. But despite the strong international condemnation of the regime’s assault on Homs, the security council remained in a deadlock due to the consistent vetoes by China and Russia. The compromise was a six-point UN plan led by Kofi Annan and a meagre and utterly ineffective UN-observer force to protect a population of 22 million people. None of the international effort had any major effect on the ground, and the UN plan for peace in Syria failed miserably. The Assad regime continued its assault on Homs, which eventually transformed into a siege of the city and its population. By that time, Bassel Shehadeh had been killed there. In the film, we learn that Aous eventually joins the FSA and Bassel returns to Homs. Bassel was one of the very first people to teach video production to citizens in Homs and how to document human rights atrocities. In one of the last scenes shot by Bassel, we see him following a video activist from Homs who is putting his laptop on a rooftop to catch a signal. The neighbourhood is

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deserted and we see the destroyed buildings. Bassel follows the video activist on the rooftop, which is under attack from a sniper in a building opposite the rooftop. He does not even know the name of his new friend yet. His name is Abou Mohammed. Bassel introduces himself to him. The situation is surreal. Both of them are at this location which could be their instant grave, we hear the shelling and shooting in the background. Bassel asks Abou Mohammed where the sniper is located and zooms his camera to the location that he points out to him. They hurry away. In a later interview, Bassel asks Abou Mohammed why he does this work for the revolution. Abou Mohammed explains that his father was a supporter of the Revolution from the beginning. He hated Bashar al-Assad with a venom beyond imagination. He shows Bassel pictures of his father and how he was tortured by the regime agents in prison. His father had told him just before he died that taking videos is the best, keep on doing it, do not get arms but gather the evidence. Eventually Ala’a travels to FSA-controlled areas in Syria to deliver medical supplies to field hospitals. Aous is assigned as a dentist to a field hospital. The film is dedicated to Bassel Shehadeh and his incredible courage to bring the Syrian Revolution to the world’s attention. Despite the tackiness of the mosaic editing and use of dramatic background music that somehow lowers the cinematographic quality of this documentary film, the power, starkness and quality of the camerawork by Bassel is undeniably present. Indeed, this documentary film, among his own directed work, is a cinematographic legacy to the body of documentation of the Syrian Revolution. It is a film that gives a glimpse behind the scenes of Bassel’s work for the Syrian Revolution. But Bassel was certainly not the only brave Syrian cinematographer and video activist in Syria. Collectively, Syrian video activists caused a shockwave and major breakthrough in the Syrian media landscape and documentary film. Suddenly from the Kingdom of Silence where people lived ‘as if ’ and media was only meant for propaganda for the regime, video activists from Syria have become revolutionary kinoks of the twenty-first century documenting life as it is. The next part of this book will focus more deeply on the digital video activism that mushroomed after the start of the Syrian Revolution in 2011.

Part Two

Eyewitnesses of a revolution As a video activist and documentary film-maker, Bassel Shehadeh became an iconic figure of the Syrian Revolution. His legacy was not only through his films but he also trained a group of dedicated digital video activists and Syrian film-makers in Homs, who continued documenting the Syrian Revolution with their cameras. Although his close friend Fadi had left Syria immediately after Bassel’s death in 2012, other friends continued training, coordinating and organizing video recordings of weekly demonstrations and news coverage from the opposition areas. Fadi eventually returned to Syria in 2013, working as a cameraman for Al Arabiya, covering the Syrian war from the north of the country. By that time, many different groups of Syrian video activists were operating in opposition areas who had taken up their mobile phones and their digital cameras as weapons to document events from protests, funerals and eventually daily bombardments  – they were the eyewitnesses of the Syrian Revolution. These were young video activists without prior cinema education, who had started filming the street demonstrations in 2011 with their mobile phone cameras. Eventually, they organized themselves into a network of media centres and grass-roots news organizations throughout the country. Some of these young Syrian talents have since established themselves as international award-winning video journalists and reporters. This part of the book is focused on a new phase and era in the history of Syrian documentary, in particular on the role of digital video activism during the Syrian Revolution. This was the popular uprising that Omar Amiralay had always predicted, and it started almost immediately the day after he died in 2011. His entire life, Amiralay had dreamt of Syrians rising up against the forty years of authoritarian rule by the Assad regime. What he had not predicted, however, was that they would do this with millions of cameras in their hands. In a reaction to the Arab uprisings and the developments in Egypt, the Syrian

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authorities had lifted the ban on Facebook and YouTube at the beginning of February 2011.1 Until then, Syrians had circumvented the state-imposed ban on YouTube by using internet proxies. The question rose immediately whether Syrians would actually stop using these internet proxies. Having direct open access to the internet would also make activists more vulnerable to government surveillance. In the past, the Syrian president had been the head of the Syrian Computer Society and lifting the ban was a way to give people more freedom but at the same time it also gave the opportunity for the state to monitor Syrian activists online. Not long into the uprisings, total blackouts were reported, in which the internet access in Syria was switched off and on by the authorities and is known to fuel fear and protests inside the country. Since its inception, the internet started to offer alternative sources to mainstream news outlets and consistently provided a digital public sphere of contestation and counter-narratives.2 The Syrian uprising that started in 2011 is called by many the most (socially) mediated and video-recorded revolution of our times, the most ‘YouTubed’ war.3 For decades, Syria was a closed-media country,4 and at the onset of the popular uprising in 2011, Syria became even more closed when foreign TV networks such as Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya were kicked out of the country early in the uprisings. To fill the media gap, thousands of Syrian street protesters used their mobile phones to record daily events uploaded on to YouTube. Where, prior to 2011, the national television networks and Arab satellite channels dominated the narratives and the airwaves of news in Syria, the upload of over 400,000+ video clips online from Syria since 2011 challenged the hegemony of mass media TV channels.5 Never before in the history of war, had a conflict been so widely covered by digital video as the Syrian uprisings. Syrian protesters and video activists have recorded some of their most personal experiences of revolution, war and violence and shared them through public digital platforms. This second part of the book is concerned about how, after 2011, grass-roots Syrian video activism emerged and transformed within a murky field of international media visibility and image politics where audiences outside a conflict zone have become armchair spectators to the deep misery and suffering of others.6 The YouTube videos from Syria form a crucial element in the digital collective memory of the Syrian Revolution. Following the wide and varied output of creative resistance in Syria, several online platforms emerged to curate Syrian videos in order to establish a growing and ever-evolving collective memory. These platforms provide digital memorials that contribute to the memorialization of the Syrian Revolution. The identity of Syrian revolutionaries



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is partly constructed with the audiovisual narratives that are created through these diverse digital platforms. Instrumental in the formation of dedicated groups of media and video activists were the Local Coordination Committees (LCCs) that sprang up throughout Syria in the wake of the first protests in 2011 to organize, coordinate and document the demonstrations. LCCs were civil society groups across cities and towns who also tried to organize the flurry of grass-roots media activism.7 The Syrian anarchist Omar Aziz had been the founding father of the idea and implementation of the LCCs. Local Coordination Committees (LCCs) had been formed as organizational structures to prepare, call for, and document demonstrations; the idea was that the local councils would be an alternative to the regime and its institutions. According to Omar Aziz, the goal behind forming these councils was ‘assisting people in running their lives independently from state institutions . . . ; the creation of a space for collective expression, which supports solidarity between individuals and elevates their daily actions into political expression . . . ; providing support and assistance for new arrivals and families of prisoners . . . ; providing a space for discussing livelihood issues . . . ; building horizontal links between local councils . . . ; defending lands in the area in the face of government appropriation to the benefit of the wealthy or military and security officers in the state.’ This is in addition to the documentation of violations perpetrated by the regime and its thugs [only], as well as providing relief, coordinating with medical committees, and supporting and coordinating educational activities.8 (Daou, 2017)

The fact that Syrian citizens uploaded the videos, made by non-professional film-makers, provides a strong link to the character of the Syrian Revolution as a popular uprising, a step towards a new civil society for young people who had been disappointed with the lack of reforms that had been promised for ten years, while a nouveau riche clique elite grew ever richer.9 The early creative resistance and documentary film in Syria was an indirect and coded protest against the authoritarian regime, but these video activists directed their protest directly to the Assad regime. Instead of coding their language, in the beginning of the Syrian Revolution, they coded themselves. Many used pseudonyms. For example, Alexander Page was a pseudonym for video journalist Rami Jarrah, who later became one of the most prominent news reporters in Aleppo between the years 2013 and 2016. Many activists also took to twitter and social media with pseudonyms to share the videos and reports from inside Syria. Amal Hanano,

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pseudonym for Lina Sergie Attar, a young Syrian-American writer from Aleppo, is still a very vocal opposition voice on social media and twitter and someone who motivated others in demonstrations around the clock. She said, We turned to Twitter to tweet for Syria, but it was #Syria that connected us to each other in a way that would never have happened in the real world. Syrian tweeps join forces on Fridays to tweet an original hashtag in support of those on the street, to ‘trend’ our cause. We watch video clips, dissect articles, and count our dead. We make jokes about the regime, we would have never dared to before.10

Other well-known Syrian Twitter activists inside Syria are the @47th (S.Rifai), who had been active since 2009, and @BSyria, who joined twitter in March 2011. The pseudonyms were used out of precaution, by bloggers and other activists using social media, to protect themselves. Afraid of being traced and arrested, a precedent was set already in 2010 with the arrest of a young Palestinian blogger called Tal Malouhi, who had used her own name to blog about Palestine and was consequently arrested at the end of 2009, upon unknown charges.11 In 2011, she was sentenced to five years imprisonment upon charges of spying. Born in 1991, she was the youngest prisoner of conscience in the Arab world.12 Using real names on social media thus had consequences. One of the few young Syrians, who blogged already several years before the uprisings and continued using her own name was Razan Ghazzawi, aka @redrazan. Using her real name, she was arrested early on in 2012 and jailed by the Political Intelligence branch, charged with ‘weakening the national morale’,13 upon which she could face fifteen years in jail. Miraculously Razan got released, moved to Europe and continued to be a front runner on Syria and is now doing her PhD in the UK.14 This part of the book is partly based on a postdoctoral research project, which I carried out between 2014 and 2016, with the Centre for Resolution of International Conflicts (CRIC) at the University of Copenhagen. In the summer of 2014, I travelled to Gaziantep in Turkey for fieldwork. My prior knowledge of this area and field experience since 1997 and personal network of contacts enabled me to quickly establish trust and rapport with my respondents. Combined with the accessibility to the liberated areas facilitated by the Free Syrian Army (FSA) through Turkey at that time, I was able to carry out a short field observation trip, where I interviewed video activists in places like ‘Azzaz, Bab al Hawa, Atarib and Darat Izza. Out of security consideration, I was not able to visit the areas in eastern Aleppo city, where the media centres operate. All other personal interviews in Turkey took place in the city of Gaziantep either face to face or through Skype.



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Since the oppositional interim government, the Syrian National Coalition (SNC), officially resides in Gaziantep, the city has become a hub of international aid organizations, UN representatives, the European Union and numerous NGOs. When I  arrived in Gaziantep in the summer of 2014, it was something different than the sleepy town called Gaziantep I remembered from 1997. The city had grown rapidly. It felt strange to be back in this town after thirteen years. At the airport I felt the warm glow of the Mediterranean summer and took a taxi. On the ride to the town centre, I noticed a road sign which said ‘Alep’ and I felt a shiver going through me. I was that close to Syria. We also passed an open minivan with Aleppo license plates, and I  felt the tears coming into my eyes. After the taxi ride, I walked to the apartment of my Syrian friend. She had given me very good directions so I rang the doorbell and walked up with my luggage. Seeing her was a joy. Two years before she had helped me in Lund, Sweden, with the collection of clothes for Syrian refugees in Idlib. She was a student at Lund University and now taking a year off to work with a Norwegian-aid organization. She worked on education with Syrians both inside Syria and refugees in Turkey. Visiting my friend was her colleague, who used to live in Aleppo. He had arrived a year ago in Gaziantep. His old neighbourhood of Suleimaniyyeh, where he had lived in the same building as his parents, had been shelled by the rockets of the regime. Not far from his home, one shelling alone had claimed fortyfive lives. That is when he decided to leave for Turkey. He told me that he had joined the protests in the beginning, but after a while when the government forces began to shoot with live fire, he did not want to go anymore, it became too dangerous. He told me he lost many close friends; one friend was in a taxi when she passed the Aleppo University that was hit by shelling. I remember hearing about that incident day, I  remember watching the video and recognizing the neighbourhood. Except for the video activists, a lot of the young Syrians I met in Gaziantep all dreamt to go to Europe. It was surreal to meet them: Aleppo and Syria were just around the corner, we were eating fustuq halebi ice cream in a Turkish city, I was seeing cars with number plates from Aleppo and hearing news from mutual friends. The border town of Kilis had now more Syrian than Turkish inhabitants and was overcrowded. Some people had their families in Kilis and still had to go to work in Aleppo, which took fifteen hours to get there, taking detours to avoid both regime and Da’esh checkpoints. Thirteen years ago, this trip took maximum three hours, including going through the bureaucracy of the Turkish customs at Bab al-Salam border crossing. All of the crossings in the north-west of Syria, mainly Bab al-Salam and Bab al-Hawa border crossings, were now under the

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control of the FSA and had been open ever since takeover. This was an important strategic asset for the SNC that was residing in Gaziantep and coordinating all governance and aid inside the FSA-controlled areas of Syria. Many of the Syrian video activists, who had passports, travelled regularly back and forth between Aleppo and Gaziantep. In 2014, many courses and media training initiatives developed in Gaziantep in support of Syrian media activists, among others, with assistance from the International Media Support (IMS) in Copenhagen – the same organization that assisted Omar Amiralay in setting up the AIF in Amman. Gaziantep in Turkey has also been the location of the development of several initiatives supporting free media in Syria such as an EU-supported media incubator, a project established in 2014 and aimed to support the development of a free media inside the opposition under the control of the FSA.

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In the beginning when we went for protests, we did not think of filming them or so. After one or two protests, we saw on TV other areas going for protests, so we thought why we do not film? We started with mobile phones. After the second protest or so, we started communicating a little bit with activists in order to know how to send them to TV channels and to set up YouTube channels.  – Interview with video activist in A’zaz, 4 September 2014.

Introduction When a Syrian friend back in 2012 described how he felt about the many YouTube video clips that were being uploaded from Syria showing events on the ground, street demonstrations but also human rights atrocities perpetrated during the Syrian uprisings, he told me, ‘We used to be killed in the dark, now we are killed in the light.’ This conversation has increasingly shaped my reflection on the role of digital video in the Syrian Revolution. The access to YouTube was embraced rapidly at the onset of the Syrian Revolution, and from that moment the velocity and visibility of digitally documenting events on the Syrian streets rapidly increased, eventually changing the way Syrian civilians communicate and share audiovisual information with each other over long distances. Many Syrians both inside the country and abroad receive their information now from social media, YouTube videos and established Facebook groups and Twitter accounts covering news in various parts of the country. Moreover, Syrians nowadays communicate with each other using a variety of applications such as WhatsApp, Viber, Facebook and Skype  – a situation unimaginable prior to 2011. The same group that was active in 2010, with charity work for displaced farmers from the north-east, about which Bassel Shehadeh made his film Carrying Eid to Camps (2010) consisting of young urban-based Syrian from Damascus, became

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more active with video activism after the start of the Syrian Revolution, and part of them formed an organization called Al Share3 (The Street). Various young film-makers and video activists emerged from this group of social activists. The enormous bulk of output on YouTube and digital video online led to the emergence of a variety of curated and congregated digital platforms posting and documenting the Syrian Revolution. One platform that emerged is called the Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution, which has sections for videos, cinemas and films. On their website it is stated, The promoters of this project believe that it participates in the documentation of contemporary history, so it is crucial that the revolution and its realities are explicitly described, for both contemporaries and makers of the revolution, for the coming generations, for the whole world. It is an archive of national legacies; to protect it is to preserve the Syrian memory, a duty because of its total consideration of historical accounts of all Syrian people.1

Another platform for creative resistance is the award-winning Syria Untold, a website that publishes both in English and in Arabic. It brings together an aggregate of a wide range of alternative media, grass-roots campaign initiatives and other independent media and artists in Syria. It has a special section for YouTube videos. Ali al-Atassi’s Bidayyat organization, described previously, publishes their short films on YouTube. Bidayyat was specifically established in early 2013 to nurture, enhance and support Syrian creative documentary filmmakers in their work and to provide a platform for them to express their art and develop their skills as film-makers in freedom. One of the most important video platforms that emerged as what is also called ‘Emergency Cinema’ is the anonymous collective of Abounaddara.2 It was first established in 2010 as a collective of anonymous film-makers, which releases films online on Vimeo. Their two- to three-minute short films gave voice to ordinary Syrians, and their day-to-day lives were uploaded every Friday on Vimeo but do not portray strong violence, wounded or killed Syrians. There is no narration, just the voice of the ordinary Syrians in various contexts using a diversity of story techniques telling a human narrative.3 Making films in a country, like Syria means choosing between two possibilities:  either collaborating with a unique narrative system that is sanctioned by unrelenting censorship, or else resisting. We chose to resist. However, unlike our older colleague Omar Amiralay, who was the first to do so, we had no public, or any material with which to interest distributors. Despite waiting so long, Omar Amiralay never saw the revolution, because he died



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suddenly of a heart attack in February 2011 at the age of 66, a few weeks before the first demonstrations began . . . We make films because it is the most useful thing we can do for the revolution. However, we do not subscribe to activist cinema that wallows in self-segregation by preaching to the converted. Instead we speak to the audience on the basis of a shared humanity, regardless of any political or national concerns. In fact, the Arabic-speaking public can access our work more easily. The foreign public also seems to have taken an interest, however, especially in Europe where festivals often request films from us even before we have released their subtitled versions.4 (Abou Naddara, 2012)

Their amazing short documentary film Of Gods and Dogs (2014) won the Short Film Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2014, and Abounaddara initially had the policy of keeping the names of the film-makers secret. By now, some of them have gone public with Charif Chiwan and Maya al-Khoury presenting Abounaddara’s new documentary film On Revolution (2017). The first departure from the anonymity policy. On Revolution tells the stories of the various anonymous Syrians over the course of the six-year revolution and poses the question of ‘how to make visible a revolution that has been rendered invisible by the smokescreen of geopolitics and media images.’5 Tarnowski debates extensively the meaning of digital videos from the Syrian Revolution and makes a range of distinctions between interpreting these videos as poetic cinema, such as Ossama Mohammed who calls the one thousand film-makers who made Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait (2014) film-makers, or imperfect reactionary cinema and lastly forensic evidence.6 The Syrian Revolution created a grass-roots media revolution that harnessed the technology of the mobile phone and small digital video camera, creating a new kind of aesthetics of low-res pixelated images conveying the most harrowing sounds and images of personal experiences of war. The pixelated raw images against polished state-controlled Syrian media parallel the street protesters against the regime army and security forces.7 Abounaddara’s documentary film-makers continue to put their lives on the front line to record their films and not all have survived. Ossama al-Halaby, video activist from al-Khaldiyeh neighbourhood in Homs, was part of the anonymous collective. Among the revolutionary youth in Homs, he was known as ‘The Heart of Khaldiyeh’, and in August 2012 on his way back from Lebanon after receiving treatment for an injury, he was arrested at the border by the military security.8 Eventually, he was executed in the prison of Saydnaya on 23 May 2017 after five

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years of detention by the regime as confirmed by the Committee for Protection of Journalists9 (CPJ) and the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR).10

The video camera as a weapon For documentary film-makers and video activists, the medium of video is not merely a technical recording tool of events but a powerful vehicle for emotional expression and moral outrage. Moral outrage is seen as an affective phenomenon but not as irrational but part of a rational action, influenced by cognitive processes and moral values that are socially constructed within a set of specific extraordinary circumstances.11 As a reaction on the regime violence, many young people took their video cameras and mobile phones as the alternative to a weapon, as an act of non-violence against authoritarianism. Combined with the felt power of many, in street protests and defiance against regime violence, the camera became a symbol of hope, of resistance as a means of disruption. Hannah Arendt equates this non-violent resistance with power and the authoritarian forces with violence.12 As the Assad regime used violence to force obedience from its followers, it felt most threatened by the video camera and these young millennials who started to think for themselves and take control of their lives. It specifically targeted these people with a camera. One of those examples is the case of the female film-maker Bahraa Hijazi, who started to document a story with her camera in 2012. The story is about abortion and through dramatic interviews, she documents the stories of young Syrian women who have gone through abortion, facing shame, social isolation and depression, yet still trying to take control over their own lives. The film-maker weaves the stories of young men arrested and tortured by the Syrian regime with the stories of the women, both fighting for a more equal and fair society. The film calls for a revolution of the soul. Bahraa was arrested at her university, while making the film, on 2 February 2012 and held for fifty-three days without charge but upon suspicion of being a subversive enemy of the state. Eventually, she produced her impressive short film Abortion of the Soul (2013), which is distributed worldwide.13 A reactionary enemy who uses violence is a much more preferred enemy for the authoritarian state. That is why eventually the non-violent activists were the first to be arrested and tortured at length, while jihadis were released from Assad’s prisons in 2012. The regime was not willing to listen but believed in violence and violence alone, to bring its people to submission and ‘teach them



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a lesson’. ‘Assad or we will burn the country’, was their preferred slogan. The outcome was massacre. When Arendt describes the clash between violence and power, she makes very clear that she does not equate power with violence, rather she describes the (non-violent) power of the people versus the violence of the state. When she places non-violent resistance in confrontation with absolute state violence, her conclusion is that the outcome of this clash would be massacre and submission, inherently saying that non-violence facing the violence of fascism stands no chance of success. It is a clash of humans versus machines. The head-on clash between Russian tanks and the entirely non-violent resistance of the people in Czechoslovakia is a textbook case of a confrontation of violence and power in their pure states.   But while this kind of domination is difficult, it is not impossible. Violence, we must remember, does not depend on numbers or opinion but on implements, and the implements of violence share with all other tools that they increase and multiply human strength. Those who oppose violence with mere power will soon find out that they are confronted not with men but with men’s artifacts, whose inhumanity and destructive effectiveness increase in proportion to the distance that separates the opponents. Violence can always destroy power; out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What can never grow out of it is power.   In a head-on clash between violence and power the outcome is hardly in doubt. If Gandhi’s enormously powerful and successful strategy of non-violent resistance had met with a different enemy – Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, even pre-war Japan, instead of England  – the outcome would not have been decolonization but massacre and submission. Hannah Arendt (1969)14

The question is whether the outcome (massacre and submission) would have been any different had the Gandhi movement possessed mobile phones and digital cameras. Pacifist video activists in Syria did not choose real weapons; they saw their cameras as alternative but powerful weapons. But what is this power of the camera? Is it really a weapon? Or does the camera provide a false sense of protection? After many years of misery in Syria, many young video activists have come to a realization and conclusion that indeed the camera is not the effective weapon they believed it would be at first. It seems Arendt was correct in concluding that if non-violent power is faced with violent fascism, as deeply entrenched as in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia similar to Assad’s Syria, the outcome can only be blood, massacre and submission.

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It was only until the widespread distribution of the internet and digital video that we could start to speak of a disruption of the hegemony of the printed word.15 The digitization of film and video has known a particular rapid evolution over the last two decades. There was no doubt at that time that digital technology was going to cause a paradigm shift and radical change in the way films and documentaries were being produced.16 In addition, some major shifts in the capacity of audio visually depositing human views and experiences were important in the development of the audiovisual in social science and the production process of film-making: the invention of synchronous sound in the 1960s, the emergence of VHS in the 1970s, digital video and DVD in the 1990s, increased relevance of participatory video, and the emergence of online platforms such as YouTube as a deposit for eyewitness media and User Generated Content (UGC). The bulk of digital media today is audiovisual; Jacobs identifies that digital audiovisual content constitutes currently more than 50 per cent of internet data traffic in 2010, while a 2009 Cisco report estimated that digital video would account for over 91 per cent of consumer data traffic by 2014.17 YouTube was launched in 2005, and nearly ten years later, the online video platform has become a public, complex and heterogeneous digital archive of recorded virtual memories.18 Through the rapid sharing of these recorded memories, a global digital network connecting people has been rapidly established which, in turn, creates an audience for the YouTube videos. Castells’s networked society theory invokes that the internet is an ideal and transparent instrument to further democracy due to its public transparency.19 The internet provides a virtual public space for performance online, but the developments in the Arab world of the past few years contest whether the internet is the ideal instrument to further democracy as it can also function as a tool to inflame violence and increased citizen surveillance.20 Hammami analyses the three phases of Facebook use in the Tunisian uprisings as gradual transformative processes changing the public sphere; however, he warns that the Habermasian concept of public sphere, being a concept derived from Western normative theories of democracy, might not be sufficient to apply assuming that this new digital public sphere contributes to democratic development.21 The internet is both a dark and a bright place and to put all faith in digital citizen journalism as a tool for democratization and change is problematic. Ghazzi prefers to use a dual approach that takes into account local circumstances and concludes that in the plethora of actors that have used YouTube in the Syrian conflict, the term ‘citizen journalism’ simplifies the complex digital media output coming from Syria.22 In the Syrian uprisings, YouTube has been used



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by a wide range of actors from activists, armed rebels, militias, jihadis, regime officers, torturers, artists and state agents, all of whom are citizens of Syria but few can be considered journalists. As units of analysis, YouTube videos recorded by Syrian activists play a critical role in creating critical consciousness, which is not unknown for the audiovisual medium to do in ongoing revolutions. Russian film-maker Dziga Vertov’s film Man with a Movie Camera was one of the first attempts to draw viewers into a revolutionary moment23 from his own particular perspective; ‘I am kino-eye, I  am mechanical eye, I, a machine, show you the world as only I  can see it.’24 During the Syrian Revolution, many Dziga Vertovs with digital video cameras used to document reality of war as experienced and seen by the person holding the camera, deciphering in a new way a world unknown to us, and it implies subjectivity by the mere fact that the camera person has chosen a camera position, an angle and a frame. Reality will change from the moment it is being observed. The introduction of a video camera in a group of people, exacerbates the so-called ‘Heisenberg effect’, that is, the subjects that are filmed become aware of the mechanical eye and act more self-consciously than before the moment a camera is introduced into their environment. The Heisenberg principle, or uncertainty principle, originates from the field of quantum physics and is often considered in studies of human visual perception.25 Human visual perception is ultimately the processing of information, which is connected to human consciousness.26 Human consciousness is based on human experience and cognition, which provides frames and lenses through which we see and interpret the world and its events around us from our point of view. The Heisenberg/uncertainty principle eventually relates to distance, position, velocity and perception; for example, when you look outside the window from a train, it looks as if the clouds are travelling with you, they are stationary. The clouds are seemingly static, but the buildings in the middle seem to go fast, and the signs and trees next to the tracks move even faster. The closer the perceived object is towards your viewpoint, the faster it goes in your visual perception when you are situated in a moving train. In reality, all perceived phenomena that are moving from your point of view in the train are not moving at all, while the clouds in the distance are moving, but in your visual perception they are seemingly stationary. Therefore, according to the uncertainty principle, one cannot solely rely on human visual perception and observation in finding out what is ‘truth’ or ‘objective reality’, assuming something like that exists at all. The influential Syrian documentary film-maker Hala al-Abdallah said that in auteur documentary film, the objective truth does not exist.27

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Just as human visual perception can be deceptive, our perception of the world around us and the other is influenced by different lenses based on previous experiences, cognitive capacity, preconceived ideas, cultural backgrounds and fluid and static identity frames based on religion, ethnicity and worldviews; therefore, the process of film-making is never really objective. Whereas a positivistic approach in social sciences embraces the pretense of ‘objective reality’ by treating video as purely an observational medium, a more phenomenological cognitive approach accepts that all audiovisual representation is subjective; it represents the language of a first-person narrative, video is suggestive, engaged and emotional.28 The earliest Syrian videos are subjective recordings of individual and collective emotionally expressive performances and social interaction rituals such as street demonstrations and funerals. The importance of the dimensions of public performance of Syrian YouTube videos brings me to methodological and theoretical reflections by Peter Snowdon and his work on vernacular videos and the Arab Spring. Snowdon discusses the emergence of user-generated content on a videosharing platform such as YouTube within the context of the Egyptian uprisings and Arab Spring.29 Snowdon describes how Judith Butler argued that ‘the people’ in the famous symbolic Arab Spring slogan ‘The people want . . . (ash-sha’b yurid . . . )’ should be seen as a performative, plural, conflictual and self-constituting cohesive body. Snowdon continues to use ‘the people’ as a performance, a theatre of politics, in his study of YouTube videos of the Arab uprisings and considers the collective of grass-roots videos covering the Arab Spring events as an accumulation of particular paths through experience, of traces of the experiences that are video, some of which may intersect our own paths but are never single, coherent and objectively verifiable as a whole.30 He argues that the uploaded YouTube videos from the Arab uprisings constitute an important and complex dialogue between the individual and the collective, in which freedom of expression is embraced. Syrian YouTube videos can thus be viewed as individual digital deposits of memories of very personal experiences of a revolution, in which individuals are trying to find meaning; ad hoc memories that are shared through public stories, these experiences are not rational but inherently emotional expressions grounded in a moral performance, an outcry for empathy from the ‘wider public’ as spectators of the injustice that is taking place ‘in front of the filmmaker’s eyes’.

Going through the wall of fear together One of the first video clips I observed from Syria where I almost felt the fear of the camera person was in the early days of the protests in Darayya whereby



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the videographer had taken out his camera and pointed it towards the Syrian security forces in riot police gear. Taking out the camera to point at the army and police in an authoritarian state like Syria is an act of courage. In the clip, the camera is shaking, the voice of the videographer trembling, he keeps on filming and in the minutes that pass the anxiety is increased, viewing the clip, I started to ask myself, will the police react and how, will the camera person get shot? The fear of the videographer is translated into the shaky image and the trembling of his voice-over, speaking quickly, mentioning the date, place as if he could be shot dead at any moment, which he probably could. The clip ends with the camera quickly tilting down. Fade to black. At this moment, the viewer is left with the awkward feeling of not knowing what happened to the protest crowd and the cameraperson, just having peeked into the lifeworld of an utterly scared Syrian protester, documenting his reality in that moment. Through the video, the viewer observed him going through a wall of existential fear. The video has become a vehicle for emotional expression. We all know the urge to grab a mobile phone to record and photograph an event when something exceptional and out of the ordinary happens in front of our eyes, specifically if we have a personal relationship to the event and therefore we feel a reflex emotion towards that what we observe with our eyes. This urge evidently also gripped many citizens and activists taking part in the early nonviolent demonstrations in Syria and who began to record events evolving around them on their mobile phones since 2011. The early demonstrations in Dera’a were thus recorded on mobile phones by the participants and close-by spectators. According to human rights activist Christopher Koettl of Amnesty International, ‘If Vietnam was called the first “television war”, Syria can indisputably be called the first “YouTube War” ’.31 ‘Going to protests was like going through a wall of fear together’ was mentioned several times by the Syrian video activists I  interviewed; fear is a central theme in the collective protests against the Assad regime. But the wall of extreme fear in Syria was thought to be absolutely impenetrable in the beginning. Syria was known as the most repressive authoritarian state in the Arab world. Despite the many expressions of artistic resistance, the thought that Syrians would go out on the streets to protest the Assad regime was almost unthinkable in 2010. The very first act of defiance against the oppression of the Assad regime happened in the far north-east of the country. Hassan Ali Akleh (1974) from Al-Hassakah, Syria, set himself on fire on 26 January 2011. His self-immolation, inspired by Tunisian Mohammed Bouazizi, marked the deep resentment and frustration that had come to boiling point with those living in rural Syria under Assad’s rule. On 28 January 2011, Syrians spontaneously went

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out on the street in Raqqa to protest the killing of two Kurdish soldiers.32 In the wake of the Egyptian Uprise, 5 February 2011 would be the Day of Rage in Syria. But no big response happened, except on that 5th February, hundreds of protesters in Al-Hassakah went out on the streets to call for Assad’s departure, which resulted in the arrest of dozens, sparking another demonstration against the Assad regime. A small group of brave non-violent protesters in Damascus, including many documentary film-makers like Bassel Shehadeh, started to plan to organize peaceful vigils in the beginning of 2011. Different groups were organizing on Facebook, with several pages promoting protests in Damascus, Aleppo and other cities. Some Facebook groups were tracked back to extreme fundamentalist Islamic groups or people from outside Syria who would like to have a similar revolution as in Egypt, led by religious organizations. Layla, a young Syrian documentary film-maker, told me at the time, ‘Someone told me that the man behind this website www.sooryoon.net used to belong to the Muslim Brotherhood, but he got kicked out because his views were too extreme. This is just plain racist ranting against the ruling Alawites.’33 Other groups were linked to the Syrian opposition, partly in exile and partly inside the country. On 2 February 2011, a vigil of around twenty people led by the charismatic Suheir al-Atassi demonstrated in Bab Touma, a Christian neighbourhood of Damascus. The group was brutally dispersed by the mukhabarat. Atassi was a young lady originating from a well-known political Syrian family, who organized this peaceful vigil in support of Egypt in front of the Bab Touma Gate in Damascus. On this day, a small group of protesters, a mere twenty young people, gathered in the Old City of Damascus in support of the Egypt Uprisings against Hosni Mubarak. But the group was met by officials of the Syrian regime. One of the participants from the 2 February 2011 vigil in Damascus described the scene to Human Rights Watch:  A group of guys and two women dressed in civilian clothes approached us. They asked us to disperse and told us that if you want to be with Egypt, go to Egypt. When we asked who they were, they said they were ‘baltajis’ [the word commonly used in Egypt to describe paid goons]. Then some of them started beating us and running after us, while one of the women accompanying them pulled [off] her belt to whip us.34

So the vigil was brutally dispersed by Syrian police. Atassi told me at the time:  ‘Yesterday we were harassed during the vigil. It started peacefully at 6 o’clock in the evening. Then the bullies came to attack us.’35 Atassi was arrested,



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beaten and interrogated, then released, upon which she immediately filed a complaint. Atassi said, I told them I wanted to file a complaint in two parts: first that the police sent us plain-clothed ‘hooligans’ to attack us and second that the police men themselves did not take any action to stop the attack . . . They held me in a separate room and after a while a man who did not identify himself came to insult me, to call me names, to tell me that I am an ‘insect’ that I was linked to Israelis and that I worked against the country.36

Syrian activists afterwards had been trying to hold daily protests all week. But only thirty to fifty people showed up each time, and a heavy security presence prevented most protests from going ahead. On 5 February, the security around the Syrian parliament building was beefed up with Syrian plain-clothes security staff, but by early afternoon, no protesters had gathered outside the building. The streets remained empty of protesters. The seeds of the Syrian anti-regime protests had been planted over decades under the stress of a dictatorship and with the deep trauma of the 1982 Hama massacre still lingering on for which specifically the Islamists in Syria wanted revenge. The Syrian State was an absolute repressive state where people were subdued into obedience and acting ‘as if ’ life was fine.37 In 2000, a simmer of reform led to the so-called Damascene Spring, which was reversed in a mere nine months. However, since then, a growing rural-urban divide and mass-mobility from the disenfranchised rural communities who started new lives in the urban areas of Aleppo and Damascus had been causing strains on social cohesion expressed in an asymmetrical power relationship between the urban business elites and the poor Syrian rural population. With an average age of twenty-two years, and half the population under twenty-five years old, a large part of the young generation of the Syrian population in 2011 was educated, internet savvy and longing for cosmopolitan development. From this group of young people, a strong sense of belonging to a generation of ‘Syrian millennials’ that could bring about positive change started to develop.

Filling the media gaps with YouTube videos Professional Syrian documentary film-makers, amateur video-makers and citizens with mobile phones felt utterly frustrated that the international media could not reach their areas and thus started to upload their material on the

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internet. Quickly, these clips were shared through social media, mainly Twitter and Facebook. The amateur videos were a response to an urgent need to record events as they were happening.38 Besides YouTube and LiveLeaks, the live stream platform Bambuser was used extensively to live-stream the Friday demonstrations, which spread like wildfire across Syria. Initially peaceful, these demonstrations gradually turned violent in response to atrocities perpetrated by the Syrian security forces and army. Some demonstrations turned into funeral processions of martyrs where the revolutionaries with a mobile phone took the opportunity to document the events, usually holding a white paper with the name of the city and date.39 The amount of user-generated video footage uploaded on YouTube increased significantly after the establishment and further institutionalization of the Local Coordination Committees (LCCs), which emerged a few months after the first demonstrations hit the streets, for example, when civil society activists gathered in protest in front of the Ministry of Interior in Damascus on 15 March 2011. According to Assaad al-Achi, who was initially involved in procuring technical equipment for citizen journalists of the LCCs, from spycams, phones, laptops and software, what began as a spontaneous popular movement gradually became organized with the involvement of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM).40 As the Syrian Revolution became militarized and violent, it has become increasingly difficult for citizen journalists to do their video work. On the other hand, the upsurge of violence also led to increased and more frequent contacts with international news media networks who became interested in the videos of violence. Syrian activists who started uploading mobile phone videos of the earliest demonstrations on the streets did this for much of the same reasons as many people who reach for their mobile phones when something extraordinary happens in front of their eyes. The first main extraordinary event was the gathering of anti-regime protesters on the streets of the authoritarian-ruled state. Then the extreme torture and killing of children, which was recorded by close family members and relatives. Gradually, when the crackdown of the regime started to use live fire and casualties fell on the street, this was another extraordinary event worth to be filmed with a mobile phone. The consequent street funerals started to gather crowds of protesters and became another extraordinary event to be recorded. The astonishment and amazement that these extraordinary events created with the bystanders led to some of them taking out their mobile phones and recording it. Therefore, the motivation to start filming and photographing



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events has its primary roots in emotional reactions towards extraordinary events experienced in life. In Syria, first it was the astonishment of extraordinary events of the revolution that disrupted the everyday life of civilians, which pushed the activists into filming the events and sharing them with the outside world. Then it was the grief and anger after the commitment of violence of war that continued to motivate video activists to record and upload their material on YouTube. The initial reactions of the Syrian regime were intended to show that Syria was different from the rest of the Arab world and would not be affected by the wave of civil disobedience that was spreading throughout that world. Many in the regime were convinced that the Syrian people were content with the reforms announced by Bashar al-Assad, while others believed that the repression by the Syrian dictatorship was so extreme that people were simply too afraid to go out on the streets, and that they would wait for the reforms to take place. Since coming to power in 2000, Bashar al-Assad had tried to reform the country, albeit on his terms only and severely constrained by the gaze of the Ba’ath party.41 Much like the NFO did with Syrian cinema, this gaze was reflected in the censorship system employed by the Syrian Ministry of Information to control in-country news production. Any media activity by Syrians had to go through a scrupulous and rigorous assessment by the censors before published, which stifled the development of any independent news. Earlier, the spread of satellite television and internet had been a nightmare scenario for the authoritarian Syrian regime as bans on satellite dishes were unsuccessful throughout the country.42 In an attempt to reform and modernize media institutions, a new media law was adopted on 22 September 2001 that did nothing more than legalize martial law, according to Nizar Nayyouf, a Syrian journalist from Latakia, who spent nine years in prison for his ‘membership of an illegal organization’, namely the Committees for the Defence of Democratic Freedom and Human Rights (CDF).43 Not so much in spite of media restrictions, as because of them, Syria has a long tradition of underground publishing both in text and film.44

How the video of Hamza al-Khatib triggered a revolution Extraordinary events in the everyday lives of Syrians motivated civilians and young activists to grab their mobile phones and document the events to be uploaded on YouTube. The very first videos in the Syrian Revolution documented experiences of hope, social justice and anxiety for a better future in the form of

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street protests. These videos were quickly followed by videos of experiences of grief, violence and despair in the form of funerals. One extreme outpouring of grief was the video that was posted online of the body of a young boy called Hamza al-Khatib from Dera’a. In January 2011, two women of the town had talked about Hosni Mubarak’s downfall in Egypt, speculating whether the Syrian regime would be next, which led to their arrest by the Syrian security forces, which in turn prompted a group of young teens to write anti-regime graffiti on the walls in Dera’a.45 A young boy named Hamza al-Khatib was part of this group and subsequently arrested by the local Syrian security forces. After he died in custody, his body was returned to his parents on 25 May 2011.46 According to Islamic custom which requires a body to be buried within 24 hours, the boy’s funeral took place on 26 May and the next day, video recordings of his funeral circulated on YouTube and Facebook leading to a reinvigoration of the earlier anti-regime protests. The amateur video showed the body of Hamza, covered in rose leaves and with clear signs of heavy duress and torture. His neck was broken, he had been tortured with cigarette butts and non-lethal bullets and his genitalia was cut off. The enormous pain and misery of the thirteen-year-old boy during the last moments of his life were clearly visible on his body depicted in the video. These two minutes of amateur video uploaded on 27 May 2011,47 had an instant ripple effect across Syria; not long after, the streets filled with angry crowds and anti-regime protests calling for the downfall of the regime all over the country. The video quickly reached far, even in places like Raqqa, 550 km North of Dera’a. A Raqqa-based video activist told me the following: On the 18th of March 2011, this was the start of the Syrian revolution in Raqqa. I began filming the street protests in April. The demonstrators were a group with people from all walks of life and it was peaceful. First, we heard about the arrests of the children in Dera’a on 15 March 2011 and then we saw Hamza Khatib’s funeral on YouTube, so we became angry and really everybody got out on the streets.48

The video of Hamza al-Khatib was also the main inspiration for Syrian documentary film-maker Ammar al-Beik to produce his short documentary entitled The Sun’s Incubator (2011). The birth of his daughter made him reflect on the images of the protests and the hope of the revolution crushed by the extreme torture of a mere child. The video of the funeral of Hamza al-Khatib was a watershed moment in the Syrian uprisings. It led to larger and more frequent protests that were subsequently cracked down on with live fire by the Syrian



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security forces, which led to more funerals, more videos of funerals and a ripple effect that became unstoppable.49 The Syrian regime replied with the upload of counter-videos in several ways: (1) With television speeches by President Bashar al-Assad (the first one on 30 March 2011) denying the systematic nature of the violence and dismissing the protests as a foreign plot run by armed terrorist gangs, these speeches became more radical over time.50 (2)  Militarized propaganda videos whereby the Syrian Arab Army is admired as the defenders of the Syrian people, laced with nationalist music and at the same time dehumanizing the opponents of Assad as ‘vermin’, ‘cockroaches’, ‘beasts’, ‘savages’, ‘rats’ and ‘pigs’. (3) Counter-narratives with forced confessions and doctors’ statements justifying and at the same time denying regime torture and violence. For example, in the case of Hamza al-Khatib, the YouTube channel ‘Truth Syria’, which functions as a propaganda channel for the Syrian regime, uploaded on 12 December 2011 an interview with medical examiner who countered the video,51 stating the boy had not been killed by torture and a confession by a so-called activist from Dera’a uploaded by ‘Truth Syria’ on 14 December 2011, who stated that Hamza al-Khatib had been part of a group of terrorists who committed violence against regime forces under the guidance of a Sunni shaykh who travelled often to the United Arab Emirates.52 The pattern during this early phase of the Syrian Revolution is relatively consistent, since the first video of Hamza al-Khatib appeared on YouTube. After each victim killed by the regime during a demonstration was recorded on film and uploaded on YouTube, a reactionary protest would follow on Friday and a funeral where a gathering of loved ones would come together who were expressing their grief and anger against the regime. The power of mourning and violence as described by Butler resonated in these videos and had a similar effect on those affected by the loss and those who could identify with the victims as the Twin Tower attacks had on Western audiences, who immediately empathized with the victims of the 2011 attacks in New  York.53 There is a certain kind of selective empathy and social energy that is induced by the YouTube videos, which leads to large groups who feel hurt by the recorded event, congregating, organizing demonstrations and, foremost, wanting social justice and revenge. There is a strong emotional effect of seeing and hearing people cry and shout slogans of despair. When the protesters were directly targeted by Syrian security forces, videos about these extraordinary events also started to appear on YouTube. The more the regime killed the protesters, the more funerals appeared on YouTube, drawing ever larger crowds on Friday, the size of the crowds in the protests and funerals gave the protesters a sense of protection. Some activists described the

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protests as life-giving extraordinary events that were giving them an incredible experience of mutual social energy to be able to finally break through the wall of fear of the Assad regime. The protests were often accompanied with dancing and music, lifting up the atmosphere. The size of the groups also mattered in breaking the previous wall of fear; the more people were shedding and overcoming their fear, the more the regime lost its authority and power to suppress. As one of the video activists explained, he saw the fear in the faces of the regime soldiers during the demonstrations, and the size of the shouting crowd triggered a violent reaction from them; they started to shoot frantically with live bullets when the protesters approached too close. The size of the crowd also reduced the video activists’ own fears, when the first protesters were joined by the coming crowds on the streets and together they became stronger. The moment the regime forces started to target funeral processions and bakeries and used heavy artillery to bomb areas where these extraordinary events took place, the violence and experience of war were immediately recorded on the mobile phones and small video cameras, causing an upsurge in traffic on YouTube channels. These were widely shared amongst Syrians on social media and Facebook, and the situation started to spiral out of control. The counternarrative YouTube videos by the pro-regime channels became more violent as well, depicting the protesters as rats, lower than animals that should be eradicated. The extraordinary events became ordinary everyday occurrences and the velocity and virality of the mobile phone videos became part of a non-linear, multidimensional entropic information flow on the spatial, temporal, aural and visual events in front of the mechanical eye of the digital camera recorded by mobile phones. The increased interconnectivity meant that the extraordinary violent events could be followed almost in real time and those who could identify with the victims on the video reacted emotionally with more street demonstrations. Eventually, the regime changed from directly targeting group gatherings and demonstrations with live fire to bombing raids and the deployment of tanks. The appearance of tanks in the streets was, for many protesters, another watershed moment similar to the torture of Hamza al-Khatib. Now their world had become a genuine warzone. Checkpoints regulated their daily lives and, by 2012, war had become a fact of everyday life in Syria. Eventually, Syria became four major regional territories: the area controlled by the regime, the areas controlled by the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and their affiliates, the areas controlled by the Kurdish forces and, in 2013, the areas controlled by ISIS. In a ranking exercise with Syrian video activists it was found that the areas under the control of the Kurdish- and FSA-related forces are most free in terms of video recording; there is no censorship



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system and, except for certain military positions, video activists are free to film anywhere. They do run the risk of kidnappings by extremist Islamic groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra and, occasionally, Ahrar al-Sham. The areas under regime control are similar in terms of freedom as before the 2011 uprisings, although tighter control and prosecution has been put in place against those Syrian documentary film-makers who were known to have been involved in anti-regime activities and demonstrations. The hardest area in Syria to conduct any video activism was in the regions under the control of ISIS. Here, video activism is virtually impossible, although some brave collectives of young early revolutionaries still operated undercover in Raqqa and other places to record daily life under ISIS and the aerial bombardments by the international coalition air forces. Aerial bombardments and funerals made up the bulk of the current video material found uploaded by Syrian anti-regime revolutionary video activists. The initial aim of using digital video tools to record and document revolutionary events such as street demonstrations, but also funerals, bombing aftermaths and the gruesome atrocities of war violence was to create empathy and solidarity from a global audience for the suffering that Syrian civilians experience under war. However, throughout the years, it turned out that instead of a global solidarity, the sheer number of videos of war and violence did not lead to the intended empathy but rather to audience fatigue with violence. The intended audiences in the West have the luxury to switch off and choose not to see the videos of violence. The videos of violence became part of the enormous collection of ‘war-porn’ available on YouTube. However, the videos of daily war violence are still part of the bulk of the grass-roots news channels that have emerged in the FSA-controlled areas; these Arab-language videos are watched and consumed mainly by Syrian audiences inside Syria and abroad.

The success of Syrian documentary films in 2016–17 The YouTube revolution that was caused by the Syrian Revolution had a major impact on Syrian documentary film-making between 2013 and 2017. This period of four years proved to be a watershed moment for the Syrian documentary. Uploaded online material found its way into major feature-length documentary films by Syrian film-makers. The question is, how long will these film-makers sustain, even if the war dies down eventually? Besides major internationally acclaimed films like Silvered Water:  Syria Self-Portrait (2014) and Return to Homs (2013), there are a couple of other Syrian documentaries that I would like

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to highlight that have used and integrated mobile phone and grass-roots digital video in their audiovisual narratives and are worth mentioning. The War Show (2016) is a personally documented essayist story of the Syrian Revolution by Obaidah Zytoon with Danish co-director Andreas Dalsgaard; in the beginning of the production, much of the groundwork was done by Danish documentary director Maria Skovgaard, who lived in Damascus for a while at the time. The story focuses on a group of friends around Obaidah, a local radio show host and DJ filmed between 2011 and 2013. In seven chapters, the film tells the story of the Syrian Revolution through the lens of Obaidah and her friends. Several of her friends also filmed and the compilation of their material constitutes the entire film, which eventually became a road movie following the trajectory of Obaidah when she moves along the different stages of the Syrian Revolution. The first chapter is ‘Revolution’, filmed in Midan where Obaidah organized and attended the first demonstrations in a spirit of hope and elation about the wall of fear being broken. The second chapter is called ‘Suppression’, which documents the state violence and crackdown on the protesters. Chapters three and four, ‘Resistance’ and ‘Siege’, are filmed in, respectively, Zabadani and Homs. In a retrospective chapter five, called ‘Memories’, Obaidah brings us to a very different mood by showing the relaxed outings in Kassab at the Syrian coast, joyfully being together with her friends on the beach, giving a sense of the group spirit of the past, from which the protest movement grew. Her friends Lulu and Hisham are a couple and are on the beach. Hisham is a handsome young Syrian man, with some dreams and aspirations for the future, but basically, he just wants to be a happy-clappy poet. The last two chapters bring the viewer along with Obaidah to the front lines in Saraqeb, Idlib, and confronting extremism in Kafr Nbel. The film in the end makes painfully clear how the Syrian Revolution was lost to the extremists in certain liberated areas, and how these confrontations affected the resolve of the early revolutionaries. The epilogue of the film is filled with the well-known pixelated images of cluster bombs, barrel bombs and country-wide destruction, dissolved in drone images of the refugee streams in Austria, the boats on the Mediterranean Sea arriving at Lesbos and other islands on the Greek coasts then, finally, into Jordan, Turkey and Europe. The harrowing Caesar photos of victims of torture branch 215 include a headshot of Hisham, the poet from Kassab beach. Other friends had been in prison and released. The Syria that Obaidah knew is gone. The last shot shows Obaidah in exile taking care of her plants because nature always survives, she says. The film has a somewhat essayist and messy narrative, but its powerful imagery and compelling personal story give an extremely important insight into



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this group of young urban revolutionaries and their trajectory throughout the Syrian Revolution. The film won several major awards at film festivals, such as the Best Film at the Venice Festival Days, Human Rights Award at the Bergen International Film Festival in 2016, Best Documentary at the Bodil Awards and the Best Nordic Documentary at Göteborg Film Festival in 2017. Last Men in Aleppo (2017) by Firas Fayyad was made in collaboration with a number of brave video activists in east Aleppo city, among others, the Aleppo Media Center. The film follows the lives of several characters from the civil defence in the liberated areas, also called the White Helmets. It is a true masterpiece of a documentary that is both a harrowing and an intriguingly compelling story that gives a unique insight into these characters and their personal lives. It uses all kinds of footage that was uploaded on line, including mesmerizing drone shots showing the destruction of the neighbourhoods. The characters are fighting to keep sane in an environment where the absurdity of war is omnipresent. In 2017, the film was the opening film of CPH:DOX in Copenhagen and has won the Sundance World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary and the main award for best Nordic Documentary at the Nordisk Panorama Film Festival (see Figure 4.1). It

Figure  4.1  Firas Fayyad receiving the prize for best Nordic Documentary in 2017  © J.I. Wessels.

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has picked up major distribution contracts, among other, with PBS. The highlight of the film was, in 2018, the first-ever Oscar nomination for a Syrian film. Within the same crew, Ali Ibrahim, a video activist from Aleppo Media Center, also produced his own film, called One Day in Aleppo (2017), that has won several awards after its premiere at Visions du Réel in 2017 and was in the 2017 IDFA competition. Finally, in 2017, Sam Kadi’s Little Gandhi (2016) was the first Syrian entry for consideration for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars. Kadi, a SyrianAmerican director, tells the story of ‘Little Gandhi’, the nickname for Syrian peace activist Ghiyath Matar, a famous figure in the Syrian Revolution. He was known for giving flowers and water to Syrian regime soldiers sent to break up grass-roots protests, inspiring other activists with his extreme courage and dedication to non-violence. Matar died in a Syrian prison in 2011. The film won several awards in the run-up to the Oscar nominations in 2017.

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The view from below: Video activism from the North

I now live in the Turkish city of Gaziantep and my safety is more and more difficult after an increase in the threats to me and my family, above all because I am a secularist and belong to the Ismaeli minority, which is targeted by the Jihadis. Naji Jerf, in a letter to the French Ambassador in Turkey, July 2015.

Introduction When Syrian journalist and activist film-maker Naji Jerf (d. 2015) made the film Da’esh in Aleppo (2015) little did he know it would mean his eventual death sentence in Gaziantep, Turkey, where he lived. His film was broadcast on Al Arabiya and he uploaded it on YouTube on 15 December 2015.1 Jerf was killed in Gaziantep by Da’esh on 27 December 2015. At the time, most, if not all, of the direct news from Syria came from the North, that being the most accessible area for video activists inside Syria. An Aleppo-based video activist explained to me in the summer of 2014: In 2012, when the FSA entered Aleppo city in Ramadan. In the beginning, I was only going for protests without filming. Then the FSA entered Aleppo, and I bought a small digital camera and I started filming with a number of young men . . . Once there was shelling on a school and a civilian building. They took the people into the school. There was a medical centre. I wanted the news to reach other people in order to come [help] minister or donate blood. Just to help us. There was big pressure. The school at the Dawwar Salah Eddin is called al Quneitra. I pulled my mobile out and all reporters there were from the regime and no one would have helped us if we hadn’t uploaded the videos. For this reason I was forced to film, upload on the internet and call for help. We had the

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opportunity and needed alternative media to the narrative of the regime who denied something was going on.2

At the time in 2014, Aleppo city was besieged and under heavy bombardment and several different grass-roots media centres were covering the daily events in the city, which consisted of an endless stream of aerial bombardments and destruction of the opposition neighbourhoods. While many activists operated under false names out of security considerations, one of the bravest female journalists and video activists was Zaina Erhaim, who always reported in her real name. She was keen on providing news from the city; prior to the Syrian Revolution she had been part of the group of young urban Damascus-based professionals and activists who were connected to the Street Foundation (Al-Share3), providing aid and relief to the internally displaced Syrians from Hassakah who camped out in the outskirts of Damascus in 2010. Among others, Erhaim has made several intriguing short documentaries, such as focusing on women in the revolution in Syria’s Rebellious Women (2015).3 As she was able to travel back and forth between Syria and Turkey; she eventually left Syria for Turkey and participated in the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul in 2016 and explained the major challenges she had faced, during a session on protection of journalists and independent reporting in crisis situations: I was asked to tell u about the challenges I am facing while working inside Syria. How to describe the horror of hearing the awful noise of a barrel bomb falling nearby, the ache travel in your body to hit your stomach while wondering whether it is going to kill you, the love of your life or one of your friends? To make the answer simpler, I decided I am going to make the challenges into categories and share with you my personal experience of being a Syrian, journalist and above all a woman.   Each of these three is now a sin that I am punished for by different authorities.   Because I am a Syrian journalist, I am forbidden from going to most of my country. I cannot go to the areas controlled by the regime where I am on the wanted lists of three different security branches, being a journalist is a crime for the Assad regime that will get me killed under torture. And I definitely cannot go to ISIS controlled areas, which leaves me with two options: live in fear under Assad’s barrel bombs and Russian bombing or do what is the scariest to many of your governments: emigrate to Europe, which is something I do not want to do.   Because I am Syrian and despite being a journalist, I am being treated as a potential terrorist in all of the international airports I  land. I  do not know a



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better definition of discrimination. Being a woman applies many restrictions on what I do, my movement, my writing especially in the conservative societies that I am working within. As the same time, because I am a Syrian woman, I am being used by some international NGOs to represent their agendas in a modern western friendly method, creating initiatives and groups that do not represent me. Let me tell you quickly how the local citizen journalists that I am working with, who have been the main source of information about Syria for the last 5  years, are not being respected and appreciated by many international news media using their services.   They do not get half of the payments as their international colleagues, they do not have insurance so when injured, they are left alone. Only because they are Syrian.   How to support Syrian journalists? Recognise them, respect them for who they are and the incredible brave work they are doing; urge your media institutions to treat them fairly; help Syrian journalists in Turkey getting into Syria through the closed borders and, finally, stop the discrimination applied on us. We are Syrians that does not make us less human or more terrorist than any of you.4 (Erhaim, 2016)

Erhaim touched upon the very core of the problem that many Syrian journalists and war reporters face in the Western world: orientalism, whether consciously or not, that determines how they are seen as the Other. The Arab uprisings, and the media outpouring that followed, made a different Other visible and helped establishing a new media ecology that has undergone revolutionary changes due to the Syrian revolt. Following Andén-Papadopoulos (2013) and Ghazzi (2014), I approach the study of the use of YouTube from a wider perspective and prefer to avoid the use of the term ‘citizen journalism’ for the Syrian video activists.5 I  prefer a more phenomenological discursive approach to analyse YouTube videos and video activism. For many who have uploaded videos from Syria, YouTube is like a stage to project an ‘I’ and ‘we’ in a Self–Other relationship6 to deposit digitized memories and experiences and a potential for media-based self-referentiality and performance to voice political opinion.7 Recording video is taking images, not in the literal sense but in the sense of how people want other people to see them. Image in the literal sense is twodimensional. Taking an image has many more dimensions. The taking is in fact also a form of giving, of giving an image of your self related to others, related to the world. Think about it, why do people take group photos or group selfies? A group photo or group selfie is a statement of the ‘we’, of we-intentionality with

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a purpose to enhance the interconnectedness and collective towards common interests and goals performed to the Other. An ordinary family photograph is a prime example of projecting interconnectedness and bonds between people, but, likewise, the so-called group defection videos uploaded by Syrian soldiers who declare on YouTube that they defected from the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) to form battalions of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) or other armed militias in the opposition. The most famous defection video was published on 29 July 2011, which is known as the declaration that established the FSA.8 The video is around four minutes long and shows seven military officers who declare that they will work with the people to bring down the regime; they call on others to defect from the Syrian Army and join the FSA, that all security forces are legitimate targets if they attack civilians and finally they call for the unity of the opposition against Bashar al-Assad. The declaration was signed by the founder and acting commander-in-chief of the FSA Colonel Riyad al-As’ad, deputy of acting commander Colonel Ahmad Hijazi, commander of the Hamza al-Khatib Phalange Colonel Abdel Sattar Yoonso, and several other commanders. A year later, on 07 July 2012, the internal security forces of the FSA were formed, also declared through a YouTube video.9 These video uploads were incredibly important for the self-image and identity of the armed opposition. These military declaration videos all follow a similar format: a group of armed men hold up their IDs in front of the flag of the opposition and pledge their allegiance to the FSA and military factions within the opposition. A close-up of the IDs is shown clearly readable as a statement of resistance against the Assad regime. The target audience is three-fold: to the regime as a statement of defiance, to the non-defected soldiers to convince them to join and go to the FSA to declare their allegiance. And then there is God. The videos usually end with a call for the highest to be ‘on their side’ as well: ‘Allahu Akbar’. These kinds of ‘we’ statements are important in Syrian YouTube activism, to identify as a group. The motivation to start filming and photographing events or special occasions has its primary roots in emotional reactions like amazement and outrage towards extraordinary events experienced in daily life. In Syria, the astonishing extraordinary events of the revolution that disrupted everyday life, pulled people into filming the events and sharing them with the outside world. It became grief, anger and moral outrage after the violence of war that continued to motivate video activists to record and upload their material on YouTube. They used YouTube to expose their suffering in order to solicit solidarity with their cause.10 The video activists acknowledge they felt fear every day; ‘What we fear most is to die every day’, they answered, when I asked them what their biggest



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challenge is when they film street events like protests, funerals or government bombings/shellings. Both Andén-Papadopoulous and Askanius analyse how testimonial user-generated videos have become ways of resistance, in which the ultimate witness or ‘shaheed’, which is how martyrs are referred to in Arabic and literally means ‘witness’, is the one who put his or her body on the line of defence against brutal repression.11 For Syrian activists, who put their body in the line of fire, it is considered courageous not to show their fear. It does not mean that the video activists are not feeling afraid or worried; they are afraid every time they pass sniper streets or hear the noise of aeroplanes and the sound of bombs. Video activists of Aleppo started to film in July 2012 when the FSA entered the city, and protests started to increase in the city of Aleppo. Some of them had already been joining protests before the arrival of the FSA, but not all had been filming the protests with digital cameras; some had mobile phones. When the FSA joined the protesters, the Syrian video activists felt safe enough to take out their cameras due to the protection of the FSA soldiers. The video activists in Raqqa started to film much earlier than those in Aleppo, as the revolutionary protests emerged in Raqqa already in March 2011 and most of the Raqqa-based video activists started filming in April 2011. In terms of educational background, the Raqqa-based video activists are similar to the Aleppo video activists in age and technical education. Despite the fact they had not enjoyed any education in film-making, some of them had a background in graphic design and they all had good knowledge and expertise in IT and computing. In terms of freedom of filming, the Syrian video activists indicated that the most difficult area to work in was in Raqqa city and Raqqa province under the rule of the Islamic State (IS). Their fighters were extremely repressive towards video activists. Those based in Raqqa were under continuous threat and lived in hiding, moving their accommodation frequently to prevent being arrested by the IS security police. They rarely filmed openly and thus resorted to spycams. Syrian video activists indicated that they had a lot more freedom of filming in the opposition-held FSA areas compared to the areas controlled by either the Assad-regime or the IS. In FSA areas, video activists were allowed to film barrel bomb aftermaths, funerals, protests and to conduct street interviews without being harassed by the authorities. They were, however, not allowed to film FSA locations that could endanger military operations. The video activists sometimes received angry reactions from the local people, the families of the victims of a barrel-bomb shelling that they filmed. They did not want the

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misery to be filmed as if it is a horror reality show, one of the activists explained to me. One activist said that there was in fact no absolute freedom to film in all of Syria: Frankly, there is no absolute freedom. If the headquarters of the FSA is shelled, it is impossible to film there. It is banned to film this. There is no absolute freedom but in case of filming, some people do not like cameras, because some of them who work here or have shops in Bustan al Qasr or Seif Ad Dawlah, go back to regime-controlled areas where they live. Some of them are pro-regime but they are inhabitants of the liberated areas and they are forced to stay here. Their houses are here and for this reason, they avoid our camera. I mean there is no harmony between people in the liberated areas and the camera that the reporter or a journalist carries. The FSA allows filming, and it has no problem with that on the condition that we are not filming their headquarters. They do not allow us to film their headquarters unless there is something special; a documentary film or a specific story only.12

Some video activists born in the city of Aleppo are without Syrian passports; therefore, they lived and worked in the eastern part of Aleppo city, which was at the time of fieldwork under the control of the FSA between 2012 and 2016. Some, however, decided to live with their families in the rural countryside of Aleppo governorate, for example, in Azaz which is close to the border with Turkey. These video activists travelled back and forth between the safer zones in the western Aleppo countryside and the eastern part of Aleppo city. Others moved their families to the Turkish city of Gaziantep and travel back and forth between Syria and Turkey. Video activists from Raqqa, based in Gaziantep, did not travel back and forth, except for one instance when a video activist smuggled himself back into Raqqa for only a few days. In general, it was extremely difficult to leave and enter the urban areas of Raqqa. The video activists from Raqqa fled to Turkey and were responsible for uploading material on YouTube and connections with the media. The footage was smuggled out from Raqqa on tiny USB sticks. What united both the intentionality of the video activists from Aleppo and Raqqa was that they shared the same enemies and dreamt of liberty, freedom from oppression, either from the Assad-regime or the IS. There was a strong resonance of an early slogan in the street protests in their motivations to continue filming, which said, ‘Freedom, we will have freedom. Despite your will Bashar, we will get freedom.’ When asked why the video activists started filming and continued their work despite the dangers and personal risks involved for themselves and their families, the majority indicated that they initially felt they had an obligation to tell the



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world what was happening in front of their eyes, whether it was a shelling of residential areas, a demonstration or a funeral, they took to their mobile phones and later digital cameras to upload their material as a cry for help since none of the international media was covering their stories and the regime media was not telling the truth of what they were experiencing. The activists wanted to record their history and upload it on YouTube as a historical document; they said, ‘This is history, this is the history of Aleppo on YouTube.’ The video activists underwent many personal losses. One of the RBSS (Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently) video activists had his brother kidnapped by IS fighters in Raqqa, and ISIS militants sent him repeated messages that his brother would be beheaded if he did not stop writing or uploading videos. From Turkey he called one of their leaders in Raqqa to say they could kill his brother, he told them ‘this is my revolution, we started it, we will continue and we will finish it’ as he quoted himself. At the same time he admitted he was extremely worried and fearful, he said, ‘but it is against my honour and pride to show fear’. When I asked him how he got the energy to continue, he answered, ‘Because we smelled four months of freedom in Raqqa, between the fall of the regime and the arrival of the Islamic State.’13 Hence, feeling liberated after overcoming the fear, the memory of feeling liberated and relieved gave enough energy to the brave Raqqa activist to continue, despite all odds. Fear is an emotional theme that runs throughout every interview that I  have conducted with a Syrian video activist from either Aleppo or Raqqa. The challenge to join, film and demonstrate a protest is to ‘break through the wall of fear’ together, the imaginary wall that kept Syrians suppressed by the Assad-regime. The fear to be tortured, to lose your family, to lose your life or your dignity caused many of them to remain quiet and submissive towards the regime authorities, in any situation of life in Syria prior to 2011. By going out demonstrating on the street, filming and afterwards uploading and showing their footage to the rest of the world, the activists felt they had regained their dignity, and the act of surviving in itself was already a victory for them and seen as an act of defiance against the regime. Overcoming their religious belief and their fears strengthened their resolve to continue, because they were convinced to have God on their side as he had witnessed the atrocities of the regime. The repetitive exclamation of ‘Allahu Akbar’, meaning ‘God Is Greatest’ or ‘God Is Greater’, after every regime bullet that was fired into the crowds, after every casualty that the activists suffered, was an exclamation of demonstration, defiance, grief and a reminder that the activists claimed their moral right on having God, who sees,

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witnesses all and everything, on their side. The size of the groups also mattered in breaking the wall of fear; the more people were shedding and overcoming their fear, the more the regime authority lost its power to suppress. As one video activist from Raqqa explained in an interview on 3 September 2014, On the 18th of March 2011, this was the start of the Syrian revolution in Raqqa after the events in Dera’a. I  began filming the street protests in April. The demonstrators were a group with people from all walks of life and it was peaceful. When we heard about the two children in Dera’a on 15 March 2011, everybody got out on the streets. It was enough for us. We could see the army was afraid of the people, of the growing crowds.14

He said the size of the shouting crowd triggered a violent reaction from the fearful regime soldiers. He and his friends were full of fear but they dug in the side streets and stayed. The fear was real, but overcoming the fear, going through it, gave him and his friends a reason to go on. They kept filming. They felt they must. The growing size of the crowd also reduced their own fears as the first protesters were joined by the coming crowds on the streets and together they became stronger. In a phenomenological sense, Syrian YouTube videos are subjective recordings of individual experiences and collective performances during the Syrian Revolution and war. The early Syrian YouTube videos can be seen as expressions of hope, documenting the revolutionary street protests as an expression of a ‘we’-identity of activist protesters who have experienced what it feels like to ‘go through the wall of fear’ together. Steve Biko, leader of the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa, warned that ‘the most powerful tool in the hand of the oppressor, is the mind of the oppressed’ and thus called for a kind of cognitive liberation in order for the liberation movement to be truly free from oppression.15 MacLeod describes in his study on non-violent resistance struggles against repressive states that even though facing fear can only really be achieved at the level of the individual, going through the wall of fear is definitely a collective process whereby the group provides a form of cognitive protection, by some activists experienced as a divine feeling of being more powerful together than the brutality of the state.16 This feeling of divine protection, while going through the wall of fear together, is also acknowledged by my interviews with video activists from Aleppo and Raqqa, when they describe their emotions during the anti-government demonstrations in the early days of the Syrian uprising. The



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individual YouTube videos can thus be seen as poetic personal testimonies of collective experiences of war and revolution; edited clips can give us insight into how patriotic, religious or nationalistic narratives and identities are expressed, enemy constructs are framed, and how military action and violence by some actors is seen as justifiable. In the recording of revolutionary protests, funerals and war events, the aim of uploading the videos from the field to YouTube is to engage the audience and, in their own words ‘tell the world’.

Street protests and funerals Two main symbolic social interaction rituals in the public space that can be distinguished as major performative rituals featuring in the plethora of Syrian YouTube videos are (1) street protests and (2) funerals and expressions of grief in the aftermath of aerial bombardments. The funerals are often recorded after the recordings of major war events such as barrel bomb impacts or the immediate aftermath of the bombardment. When Syrian video activists record an antigovernment street protest and upload this on YouTube, they share a dream, often a dream of freedom, of self-determination, of a dreamed state or order, with an outside audience. If Syrian video activists record an air raid, bodily injury or a funeral and upload this on YouTube, they share a nightmare, a deep human experience of war, a snippet of their personal trauma. Both are performances of social-interaction rituals17 that ignite and trigger emotional reactions with those who watch the video. While a funeral constitutes a ritual of grief, a demonstration is an organized ritual of hope for social change and freedom. What is striking is that when the Syrian video activists describe the emotionally charged atmosphere at the earliest protests they recorded on video, they often talk about the fear they saw in the eyes of the army, that the soldiers were fearful of the crowds on the streets, while the people themselves were not as afraid. Taking a first step to go out to the street and demonstrate against the regime was a sign that the wall of fear of the government and the security police was broken the moment they entered the streets and saw the crowd: the sheer size of the group on the streets made them lose their fear and instead instilled fear in the government soldiers, even though the crowd was unarmed and peaceful thus posed no real threat to the army. Many of the protests in Syria were triggered by funerals as performative street processions, which were a legitimized platform of group gatherings. Funerals are in themselves culturally and religiously embedded performative social

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interaction rituals and serve as emotional outlets in Syria. Most funerals are ad hoc, in a sense that the body needs to be buried on the same day of death in case of a Muslim funeral; therefore, the protests are not planned in advance but are spontaneous expressions of grief and resentment against those who killed the deceased. In many cases, the perpetrator was the government, but there are also many videos of funeral processions of army soldiers. Gradually, the street protests became less, the funerals stayed on and moreover, bombings and especially the aerial bombardments and barrel bombs were daily occurrences in opposition-held and non-regime areas, both in Aleppo and in Raqqa, filmed by video activists. The video activists are confronted with daily trauma and some of their worst experiences are uploaded. Specifically, videos from barrel bombs have deep impacts on the activists. Some of them keep on filming, even if the video contains graphic details such as human body parts. In one instance, an activist from Aleppo, lost a friend during a barrel bombing in the area of Sukkary on 16 June in 2014. He recounted his experience to me in short sentences: G:

The worst experience I have had while working on a film? The worst experience is a bit old. It was 1.5 years ago. I will never forget it. I was in Salah Eddine neighbourhood. It was Ramadan and people were fasting. I had a new camera, the one I told you about. The Sony one. The small one. One of the FSA soldiers asked, ‘What do you do here?’ I said I am a journalist. He said, ‘What is your job?’ I said, ‘I take pictures and upload them online’. He said, ‘There is a martyr there, go and photograph him’. The martyr was a bit far, around a 100 meters. In that street there was a sniper for the regime. Do you know about snipers? Me: Yes. G: I said, ‘In this street there is a sniper’. He said, ‘No, there is no sniper’. Then, when we walked in the street, I walked in the front and he walked behind me. I was carrying the camera, recording and I said ‘There is a sniper’. He said ‘No. If there had been one, he would have shot at you’. We entered the street and I said, ‘He might be selecting now’. Do you know what that means? He is selecting now. Suddenly, the young man behind me was shot by the sniper and he was martyred. He fell down. The sniper shot him in his neck. I hid in some building and I screamed, ‘Ambulance! Ambulance! Ambulance!’ The FSA battalion came and they fired heavily until they succeed in dragging the body away. I stayed in hiding for around two



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hours. Then I ran and returned back. That’s it. The other experience was in Bustan al Qasr. A barrel bomb was dropped. We went there to film. People gathered. They were helping the wounded. Then another barrel bomb was dropped and 60 people were martyred, a documented number. But the number is much higher than this. All of them came to help the wounded and were killed by a barrel bomb. You mean they are more than 60. No. With the first barrel bomb, only two were martyred. But when people gathered to help, the helicopter’s pilot went around for a while and returned back and bombed them. With another barrel bomb?. Yes. At the same place. When people gathered. The pilot dropped another barrel bomb and the number of martyrs became bigger. Were there civil defence forces there? Four of the civil defense forces were martyred and two from a humanitarian aid organization, a photo-journalist. I escaped death. I was present there. A young man shouted, ‘He dropped, he dropped!’, meaning that the barrel bomb was dropped. We hid in a falafel shop. The barrel bomb landed. We went out and the scene was terribly horrifying. I will search for the video and get it for you. This is not 18+, this video is 1000+. It is something big. Therefore when I told you, I am scared of death, because it is something scary to be here. At any moment . . . for three days, I did not feel normal. I did not like to go to work but later bit by bit . . . in the beginning it was so difficult . . . but I went back, I have to.18

The video shows the moment directly after the barrel bomb was dropped, a desperate man and his daughter hold up a hand and a foot of one of the victims of the Assad-regime’s barrel bombs.19 The video is a graphic recording of the deep experience of war, of the gruesomeness of bombings and their aftermath. The gesture by the girl is an expression of both desperation and anger triggered by extreme grief over the loss of life and the deep injury. She puts the blame squarely on Bashar al-Assad as the regime planes have thrown the barrel bombs on the Sukkary neighbourhood. She gestures angrily towards the camera man, not to blame him but trying to capture his attention and using the camera as a platform for her testimony, she asks with her gesture for an explanation why this happened, as if the cameraman is the only one who holds the power to convey her message and existential question to Bashar al-Assad and the regime. In a sense, the camera does technically have that power, but it is unlikely that Bashar

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al-Assad will ever watch this video clip. The camera silently records the cruel human experience of war. The sound records the shouting, the frantic cries, the chaotic and desperate exclamations of the people, ‘Allahu Akbar’ is heard many times as a cry for help from God, a cry of despair and disbelief, at times we hear the ambulance sirens and falling rubble in the background. The cacophony is immense, impressive and leaves anyone who watches this video numb for a while. The cameraman wanted to send this message to the world to show what is going on in his neighbourhood, which is why he uploaded this video that is, for many, too gruesome to watch. The best experience that video activists told me they had were the early protests that were peaceful with a lot of dancing and music on the street and the eventual ousting of the regime forces from the area by the FSA. Furthermore, more recently in Aleppo, the street protests against ISIS when ISIS controlled their parts of Aleppo city. It was a turning point and not long after those protests the ISIS forces were pushed out of these Aleppo areas, back towards the east of Aleppo province. One of the main challenges the video activists faced was with radical organizations, such as ISIS, Jabhat al Nusra and other extremist organizations. Filming in areas dominated by these groups, video activists faced the risk of kidnapping. When one of the activists was kidnapped for a month by the IS fighters, many of his friends and colleagues posted numerous Facebook status updates and through their networks tried to get him free, which eventually was done. But not without consequences, their colleague was traumatized and had undergone severe torture at the hands of the ISIS militias. He spent months to recover, but he is now back to work based from A’zaz. By 2014 and 2015, the content that the video activists were uploading from Syria changed from weekly Friday protests on the streets, with a sense of hope to reform and change of government, to funerals and the personal records and experience of a daily war of aerial bombardments. During 2011 and 2012, the protests on the streets were usually introduced with an A4 sheet where the date and location would be written with a logo from the opposition, then wide shots of the crowds of the demonstration, music and dance and revolutionary songs. Since 2013, fewer of these kind of videos could be found, and increasingly they became videos of war, violence, death and destruction. Taking as a case in point the video collective of Nour Media Centre from Aleppo, a typical format and structure of videos of violence can be distinguished. The duration of the videos of violence are typically between two and four minutes. The activists indicated that they upload often just a couple of minutes per day due to the poor internet connections in their area, but if



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they would have good connections, they would have material of four hours per day. The videos have increasingly become edited since 2013 and Nour Media has a specific format for their news videos. Their content contributed to the Aleppo-based news channel Aleppo Today, providing daily news of events in Syria, focused mainly on Aleppo province. Nour Media became famous among Syrians through their Miracle Baby Video Clip uploaded on 22 January 2014.20 The clip of approximately eight minutes was shot after a barrel bomb attack in Aleppo city. The rescuers of the Civil Defence notice that a toddler is stuck in a collapsed building. As they frantically dig out the dirt, the baby is finally pulled out and alive. The clip became known as the Miracle Baby and quickly spread throughout social media, worldwide. What is interesting is that the Miracle Baby video clip went viral while the second clip, which followed how the baby was doing after seven months, generated much less interest.21 The bulk of their videos contain aerial bombardments, which usually start with a scene of the direct aftermath of the strike, whereby there is chaos, people in despair and an outcry. What is often seen next are interviews with directly affected civilians who take the camera as a testimonial tool. They talk directly to the cameraman, shouting, blaming either the regime or the Russians, the camera becoming an emotional outlet, to shout to the world, an unfortunate cry in the dark of despair making gestures towards the camera, showing their children, or holding their heads, crying out like the clip uploaded from Aleppo city on 15 March,22 1 June23 and 13 April 2015.24 These first parts are extremely emotional, followed by scenes of the civil defence rescue operations and an interview with a representative of the Civil Defence aid workers (White Helmets). The Nour Media channel records meetings and community theatre plays and also documents street demonstrations that are organized and staged. For example, they recorded a street protest in commemoration of watershed moments and extraordinary events during the Syrian uprisings, such as the chemical massacre that took place in the Ghouta on 21 August 2013. The video activists kept on filming ‘their history’, their world, their habitat to share on YouTube throughout 2014 to 2016. But the outside audiences were not anymore shocked, the brutal videos coming from Syria have not become the agents of change that the video activists wished they would become in the beginning. Their YouTube videos did not lead to solidarity or support democratization and there was no rush to aid and protect the Syrian people under duress. Instead of leading to a more concerned reaction, the overload of information generated fatigue and apathy with Western audiences. This outcome created a deep sense of disappointment and abandonment for those who have been video recording protests against repression

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and dictatorships in the front lines of popular uprisings. The thousands upon thousands of videos uploaded on YouTube by Syrian non-violent protesters failed to yield more and better political action to stop the war in Syria. The expression of their dream of freedom is still regularly indicated as the main reason why the video activists do what they are doing. They feel that extremist foreign jihadi fighters have hijacked the Syrian Revolution and are a major obstacle to fulfilment of these initial dreams in the early days of the Syrian Revolution. A video activist from Raqqa formulated it like this: ISIS fighters are no proper jihadis for me. Jihad is justified if it is against American soldiers or Israelis who have committed war crimes against Arabs, but ISIS started to kill women and children and beheading our people. This is not jihad. Nowhere in the Quran it says to behead people for Jihad. It is for animals like sheep. The Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) says that a prisoner of war should be treated well and not tortured or assassinated. ISIS makes a mockery of Islam. They brainwash people and do not understand the Quran. They can only recite or memorise and do not know any of the hadith or learned any intellectual reflection. They do not know the meaning of forgiveness, they only read how to revenge. They only take the parts of the Quran that suits them. They do not believe in borders. All is Islamic, they say they break Sykes-Picot and all is Bilad al Shaam. They only consider Muslims if you join their Islamic State, if not then you are automatically an infidel, regardless how devout and religious person you are. The regime never strikes ISIS anywhere, it helped ISIS in Deir Ezzor and on record between Aleppo and Raqqa. They buy oil from them. What the international community should do is to support the Free Syrian Army (FSA)! Seventy fighters from the FSA defeated 200 ISIS fighters in Aleppo province but they did not have enough weapons and ran out of ammunition, this is the main problem. But the US doesn’t do anything for us. Nothing. They do not need to do these airstrikes in Raqqa, this is utterly stupid. They need to assist the FSA troops on the ground. If these guys had good weapons, they would be so much stronger that the ISIS because they have the support of the Syrian people. During the three months of freedom we enjoyed in Raqqa, the coffee shops were open until 4 a.m. We felt free, we were free people, I  smelled the freedom and it was great! So we will stay, our dream is to free Syria from both ISIS and the regime. But one thing, ISIS does not think about the future, they think just for today and how to make money. They will not survive because they do not think about tomorrow. They will not survive longer than three years, if they keep going like this. Just recently Raqqa was without electricity for 5 days and ISIS had no solution. The bakeries had problems providing bread. ISIS took over the prisons from the regime, their system is exactly the same.25



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There is a general frustration and disappointment on how increased amounts and digital availability and velocity of news from the Syrian Revolution did not necessarily lead to solidarity, support, democratization, transformation, reform and action. There is a certain kind of apathy, fatigue and selective empathy when it comes to the YouTube videos uploaded from Syria. We are facing a global problem of selective moral outrage. This is exemplified by the apathy in reaction to the quantity of audiovisual citizen media coverage of the Syrian uprisings.26 Empathy is selective, which means that watching videos of violence with Syrian victims did not necessarily lead to universal altruism and solidarity from Western publics. Political theorist Judith Butler developed seminal theoretical insights into enemy constructs and the selectiveness of mourning and empathy after the attacks of 11 September 2001 and how this led to the consequent political justifications for the global war on terror.27 Other important studies have since looked at the role of propaganda, media and media globalization in global conflicts and its cultural-political implications whereby the labelling of someone as a ‘terrorist’ has been scrutinized.28 Selectivity of empathy is reflected in the media framing of Syrian refugees as either ‘Islamic terrorists’ or ‘economic migrants’ instead of refugees of war seeking safety and compassion and a good place to bring up their children. The labelling of the opposition as Islamic terrorists serves only one purpose for Assad, to desensitize and dehumanize the opposition so that those who are supposed to kill them will not empathize, and killing them will become a justified action and integral part of the authoritarian banality of evil. The videos uploaded by Syrian video activists give us a glimpse into their daily lives, emotions and their experience of the Syrian uprisings and function as data to investigate the local level and personal emotional experiences of war, under-researched units of analysis in peace and conflict studies as indicated by critical peace studies. The videos are subjective projections of the deeply personal experiences of life under attack and break through the mainstream dichotomic media narratives about the Syrian war. The videos uploaded on YouTube from Syria provide a valuable record of the development of the Syrian Revolution. With the explosion of vernacular Syrian YouTube videos as a chaotic plethora of recorded human emotional expressions, experiences, narratives, enemy constructs and propaganda, the injured, nonWestern ‘Other’ provide their own subjective story, independent of established international media narratives; suddenly Syrians have given themselves names, faces, sharing their own personal histories and experiences of war, slogans and daily lives with the outside world. Their work and accumulating audiovisual

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records of their personal experiences will provide an important and extensive digital memory of war that is unprecedented and continues to shed light on the daily lives of Syrians under war. Reflex emotions to extraordinary events, moral outrage, common dreams, symbols and dreamed-of orders are major drives and motivations for the Syrian video activists to continue documenting the Syrian war. They identify strongly with the ideals of the Syrian Revolution and see themselves as the guardians of Syrian history, depositing their memories and experiences of war through digital video in the public realm. In this sense, the videos could be seen as accumulative anti-war poems that are intended to motivate the outside world to work for peace in Syria. Reflex emotions to violent events, moral outrage and the physical experience and injured bodies play an important role in the Syrian videos; it remains to be seen whether the audiences the videos are intended for, both in the West and the Arab world, are actually willing to watch these violent video clips about the cruelties of warfare in Syria. I expect not. People do not normally watch these videos for fun or entertainment. Western publics do not want to be confronted with the experience of war of the far away others, and some pro-Assad groups are actively cognitively dissonant of the existence of Syrian suffering, claiming that the video activists are faking the videos of barrel bombs and suffering and the Syrian Revolution is a Western-induced strategy to destroy Syria. Besides the ardent pro-Assadists, there is a subconscious selective moral outrage based on territoriality and culture through which the Syrian YouTube videos are perceived by Western publics; amateur videos of victims of the bombings in Paris in 2015 did lead to a public outcry from the Western media public. Paris is part of Western society, hence Western publics feel more affected when bombings and killings happen there. Orientalism still runs deep in the subconsciousness of the previous colonial powers, and Western publics can empathize more with those who are culturally, religiously and ethnically closer to their understanding of what is Western society. The danger of this subconscious orientalism and selective moral outrage is that people in Syria are not really regarded as equal humans, certainly not if the entire Syrian opposition against Assad’s dictatorship is equated with terrorists and ISIS.29 The justification of collective punishment, violence against civilians under the narrative of a ‘War on Terror’ is greatly favoured and supported by the seemingly secular Assad-regime and its international allies Iran and Russia. We see a convergence of American and Russian foreign policy towards Syria, ISIS and the Assad-regime. The international coalition bombings that started in Syria



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in 2014 are thus justified as part of the ‘global war on Islamic terror’ and, in the experience and perception of many of the Syrian video activists on the ground, the international coalition coordinates its aerial bombardments with the Syrian army.30 The initial reason for Syrian video activists to film was the desire to express and share their everyday experiences, suffering and nightmarish events of war with the wider world as a testimonial, with the public online sphere, to urge those outside to take action and help stop the ongoing nightmare. Common dreams, nightmares, shared experiences and close friendships are part of the major drives and motivations for the Syrian video activists to continue. In their own words, they ‘smelled freedom’. The Syrian YouTube videos disrupt the dualistic traditional narratives of war and show us the pluralistic nature of violence and conflict, the videos tear down the common dichotomies. One of the prerequisites for the halt to violence is for the ‘enemy’ to become ‘human’ and despite the very bleak outlook today in Syria, if the Syrian YouTube clips are considered individual Wilfred Owen antiwar poems expressing a moral imagination and dream for freedom and peace, in the long run these videos might have a positive effect and indeed create the empathy and recognition needed for eventual conflict transformation and resolution. But, instead of creating empathy with the viewers, the overwhelming number of videos and the massiveness of the grief and injury recorded in the YouTube clips seem to have had the opposite effect; people in the West do not want to be confronted with the experience of ‘someone else’s war’, and some are actively cognitively dissonant of the existence of Syrian suffering. The viewer protects him or herself. The danger here is that people in Syria are not regarded as humans, if the entire Syrian opposition against Assad’s dictatorship is equated with terrorism and the IS. International coalition bombings of Syrian civilians are then justified as part of the ‘global war on Islamic terror’ in which the death of Syrian civilians are insignificant. Activists in Syria thus have nothing to lose, if anything it has emboldened their drive for social justice, revolution and change. Yassin al-Haj Saleh, the Syrian intellectual and writer, also known as the conscience of the Syrian Revolution, formulated the situation as follows in an interview with Michael Young: ‘When our death is meaningless, our life is also meaningless. For me, that means that we have to be agents in a global change in order to reclaim any meaning for our life and our sacrifices. This is the necessary meaning of being a revolutionary in our present time.’31

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Despite much evidence emerging of his grave war crimes, Assad appears to be given the green light to continue his brutal campaign against any Syrian civilian who steps out of line. When Western media report on Syria as a dichotomy, framing it as a conflict between equal parties, extremist jihadis on one side and the Assad-regime on the other, it aligns seamlessly with Assadist propaganda. However, in reality there is no such dichotomy in Syria and certainly no equal measure between ISIS and the Assad-regime, when the latter is responsible for the majority of all civilian deaths in the Syrian war.32

6

Politics of the image: Relations with international media

Neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other. That these supreme fictions lend themselves easily to manipulation and organization of collective passion has never been more evident than in our time, when the mobilization of fear, hatred, disgust and resurgent self-pride and arrogance – much of it having to do with Islam and the Arabs on one side and Westerners on the other – are very large-scale enterprises. Edward Said, 20031

Introduction This chapter is concerned with how Syrian video activism between 2011 and 2016 transformed from amateur footage into professionalism within a murky field of international media visibility and image politics, where audiences outside a conflict zone have become armchair spectators of the deep misery of others2 while at the same time being spoon-fed on a biased and simplified picture of Syria as a conflict between extremist jihadis and the Assad regime. Lina Khatib has written extensively on the politics of the image, orientalism and the media, in particular, as well the cinema industry, in the Arab world.3 In 2012, Khatib published a study of various countries in the Middle East, such as Lebanon, Iran and Egypt, and how visuals are used in political struggles in the Middle East and how states, activists, artists and people ‘on the street’ are making use of television, the social media and mobile phones, as well as non-electronic forms, including posters, cartoons, billboards and graffiti to convey and mediate political messages. Her work compares how the West represents the East but also how, for example, Middle East cinema and media are representing historical events.4 Media landscapes vary in geographical space and attention selectivity,

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and indeed, world news is dominated by the rules set in the Western world and various power dimensions in a political economy. It has created a media landscape of selective empathy and attention. For example, recent research carried out by Oxford University using Wikipedia pages on plane crash events has compared the maximum attention and number of deaths per plane crash of various national airlines and found that on average a European death receives 26 times more attention than an African death.5 In that sense, news and social media landscapes can be seen as fields, whereby agents/actors and their social positions are situated in a power structure, as Bourdieu argues in his work on cultural production.6 Each position of a particular agent within the field is the outcome of interaction between specific rules, written and unwritten, according to both private and public processes, of the field, the agent’s habitus and his/her (access to) different categories (what Bourdieu calls ‘species’) of capital.7 Different species of capital can thus be cultural, political, social, economic, which could be converted for the purpose of strengthening an agent’s power position within the field. Let us say, in the case of Syrian grass-roots film-makers and video activists, their power in the international news media field is less consolidated than that of Western and foreign war reporters, who either are working as staff for international broadcasters or are freelancers. The latter have a habitus connected to a personal network within which they can sell their content, footage and images while Syrian film-makers and video activists do not have access to this kind of capital. The international news media industry determines the rules; it determines which images are valuable and interesting enough to sell to the broadcasters. This determination is often not the same as those who are at the grass roots, documenting their reality. It leads to ambiguous relations between foreign war reporters and grass-roots media activists. Considering the experiences of Syrian video activists, operating within a highly mediated political media landscape, this chapter reflects on the ambiguous relationship between Syrian video activists, film-makers and the international news media industry covering the war in Syria. Why does some material produced by Syrian video activists gain international media attention and other footage not? How is this content presented? Is commercial spectatorship more important for international media professionals than for Syrian video activists? Is there something at play at a deeper cognitive-emotional level related to grievability and selective empathy? The chapter argues that the main motivation for Syrian activists to film was not about commercial spectatorship, while the international news media, reporting and covering the Syrian war, are foremost determined by their publics and the strategic politics of their countries.



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After the Dera’a upheaval in 2011, the Assad regime had given some international correspondents access through an official visa, and the Ministry of Information had organized special press conferences and tours to the affected areas in Dera’a. Guided by the government minders, huddled together as a group, the international press was professionally kept away from meeting any of the demonstrators. In the first months of the Syrian uprising, virtually no Middle East correspondents of major broadcasters managed to get to rebel areas without Syrian government minders who prevented people from talking openly to the journalists for fear of severe reprisals. The video uploads by Syrian citizens thus served as correctives to the reports of foreign correspondents, many of whom did not dare to leave their heavily guarded hotels in Damascus and were consequently called ‘hotel journalists’ by the Syrian media activists. One video activist told me the following about these hotel journalists:  I already filmed so many protests in Zabadani with the LCC and sent many hours to all the news outlets via email to the international broadcasters but they were not interested. They only reacted when Zabadani became the first area to be liberated by the FSA. Then they came, only for a day or two and then they left again, the interest was gone but the situation stayed the same. The bombardments continued. This is the news mentality. I don’t like it.8

Video activists and film-makers in Syria came from a different position into the media coverage  – for them the revolution was their life, twenty-four hours a day – for the hotel journalist it was just another assignment, and the news value of events is determined by their editorial bosses abroad. Different definitions exist on what story is newsworthy and where are the locations of reporting matter for balancing the story. For example, when the coverage of the Syrian war by foreign journalists mainly started to take place from the north of the country, since it was easiest to reach from Turkey, a preferred location of the Syrian war coverage was either Gaziantep or A’zaz. A’zaz is located just over the border at Kilis, at the Bab al Salam border crossing. A new municipality and local coordination committee was established to carry out civil governance tasks such as issuing birth and marriage certificates, to retain some kind of normalcy under war (see Figure  6.1). Many foreign journalists, both experienced and inexperienced, would stay in a hotel in the Turkish border town of Kilis waiting to be able to cross into Syria, either officially or unofficially through smuggling. Once they had reached Syria, video activists would usually take these foreign journalists to the bombed mosque of A’zaz with a burned-out tank in front, which then became the favourite spot to photograph and illustrate

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Figure  6.1  The new municipality in A’zaz in opposition area inside Syria. Photo: J. I. Wessels.

any story about Syria, with verification that indeed the Western photographer had been physically inside the country. Early on in the Syrian uprising, experienced foreign journalists like Anthony Shadid, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Middle East correspondent for the New York Times, among others, and, earlier in the uprisings, CNN’s experienced correspondent Ben Wedeman, both fluent Arabic speakers, did cover the Syrian war from the northern liberated areas under the control of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). It was unfortunate that Shadid died of an asthma attack after having been on horses, returning from a reporting trip inside northern Syria to Turkey in 2012. Ben Wedeman stopped reporting from liberated opposition areas when, after the many kidnappings and the ISIS beheading videos of, among others, James Foley, major news broadcasters did not allow their staff to travel into these areas anymore. When I  returned from my field trip into Syria in 2014, Ben, a long-time friend, sent me the following message on 7 September 2014 on social media: So how was it? CNN is very hesitant to send any of us back inside Syria, but your pictures show a much calmer picture . . . It looks like you were in non-IS areas



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. . . Glad you’re ok. CNN is obsessed with IS and terrified we will be kidnapped and decapitated . . . last time I  was there, Atmeh was our safe haven between two-three days trips into Aleppo. But that was before all the crazies (foreign jihadis) started coming. Unfortunately, CNN as it exists today is all about fear mongering. The problem is we end up scaring ourselves. Into paralysis.9

The ISIS videos of foreign journalists being beheaded indeed had their intended effect; it created extreme fear and kept away foreign journalists from all nonregime areas, even if it was clear there was no ISIS presence in that particular area. Major international broadcasters did not allow their staffs to go inside Syria. So they relied on foreign freelancers or local media activists. When I asked one of the young Syrian documentary film-makers and media activists in Gaziantep in August 2014, how he felt treated by the international broadcasters, he replied, Most of the reporters are knowledgeable and they are ok and some approach us just as fixers, they give you no rights. In the beginning, during the demonstrations some did not pay and we learned from this. The foreign reporters were very afraid of the regime and did not want to work here themselves, so they just asked footage from us. Until now there is a problem with getting paid. We are not taken seriously as professionals. Yes, in the beginning we made the mistake not to ask for money, but we learned to be more business like. We have a group now together and we are better at it now. We faced problems, we took risks, great risks, we put our lives at risk and this should be remunerated as well. I don’t have a lot of credits on the work I did with international broadcasters. It depends, some reporters who are professional, they pay a normal fee and give credits, like Al Arabiya, they gave me credits 4 times and Al Jazeera Arabic they gave me twice credits. BBC, CNN and CFI, we were all working with them. They are better and more professional than the Arabic channels, also in terms of copyrights. But we also had cases that we lost control over the rights. (Amro Khito, 2014)10

On the other hand, mainstream foreign journalists specialized in the Middle East did report from Syria, but under the guidance and supervision of the Syrian regime. Hence, they were either embedded with the Syrian Arab Army or taken on a specially organized media trip by the Syrian Ministry of Information (MOI). Otherwise, seasoned war reporters were taken for a ride by Assad’s propaganda machine. The most poignant example of this is the biased coverage from Syria by the well-known British journalist Robert Fisk. Having maintained good relations with Assad’s spokesperson and propagandist Buthaina Sha’aban over

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the years, Fisk was able to enter Syria many times on a visa issued by the Syrian regime. He embedded himself with the Syrian Arab Army and hence covered the conflict from a point of departure that forces him to align with Assad’s approved narratives. In one particular case, the massacre of Darayya that took place in August 2012, Fisk claimed to have been the first foreign journalist to enter Darayya and explains this as a prisoner swap gone wrong, which resulted in a massacre.11 This was exactly the narrative that the regime wanted to hear. Fisk was embedded with the regime army. The Darayya massacre was carried out by regime forces, between 20 and 25 August 2012, and reportedly killed over five hundred people, according to the Local Coordination Committee (LCC) and Human Rights Watch. Darayya had long been a hotspot for anti-regime protests, and through their activism, the residents were targeted by regime forces. On 25 August, video activists from the LCC had uploaded a YouTube video of the victims.12 The two-and-a-half-minute-long clip depicts the aftermath of the massacre inside a mosque where civilians had gone to protect themselves as the Syrian regime army broke into Darayya. Hundreds of women, children and elderly people, who were trying to flee, were killed by Syrian regime forces. The reporting about the massacre from the Assad regime’s side came under heavy scrutiny when a journalist, Micheline Azaz, from Addounia pro-regime TV channel had visited the site just after the massacre and interviewed a wounded woman at the cemetery and a little girl grieving next to her dead mother.13 Janine di Giovanni reported that a resident of the town relayed to her that this journalist had gone through the crowds and talked to the wounded as if she was unaffected by their wounds, cries and the hell in front of her.14 Without requesting an ambulance for people who clearly are in need of urgent medical care, the Addounia journalist pushes the victims to say that the ‘terrorists’ did this to them while the cameraman filmed close-ups of nearby corpses hanging out of car windows.15 Thus, what Fisk failed to mention is that he was not the only foreign journalist covering the Darayya massacre. Freelance journalist di Giovanni had also entered Darayya, but without a minder and she had managed to talk to residents without supervision of the Syrian MOI. She recounts the reporting trip as follows in her book: The witnesses I spoke to [blamed] the government. The day after I left Darayya, I went to see a government official. Abeer al-Ahmad, who was the Director of Foreign Media at the Ministry of Information, . . . was visibly furious. Even before I told her, she knew I had been inside Darayya. ‘It was a prisoner exchange of terrorists gone wrong’, she insisted. ‘It has always been a hideout for terrorists. It



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was meant to be part of a wider campaign in the southern suburbs to rid the area of the opposition forces.’ . . . but I still remember what I witnessed those days.16

Janine di Giovanni heard from several witnesses in Darayya that the regime had carried out the massacre and that they had even destroyed the mosques, something that even the French had not done. Fisk insisted that it was a prisoner escape gone wrong; he kept going back and forth to regime areas while di Giovanni had her visa revoked by the Syrian government because she reported what had really happened in Darayya. Fisk was a seasoned war reporter and had failed to meet any of the activists of the LCC in Darayya; instead, he said that the FSA was implicated in the massacre and allowed himself to be a useful tool for Assad’s propaganda.17 A  strong reaction from Syrian dissident intellectuals Yassin al-Haj Saleh and Rime Allaf, both in exile, condemning Fisks’s reporting from Syria was published not long after on Open Democracy.18 After reporting about the Darayya massacre, embedded with the Syrian regime, Fisk had lost all his credibility as a journalist and became complicit in covering up a massacre. The above incident about foreign reporters covering the Syrian war shows how important it is for Western journalists to be at the right location and describing the right context and not to let the Assad regime lure them into painting another picture of the reality. Another advantage is if foreign journalists in Syria understand and speak Arabic. Those who have little knowledge of Arabic, such as Fisk, are easily manipulated by the Syrian regime. Their minders, working for the secret police, also function as translators and thus cannot be relied upon for proper translation of answers from residents; moreover, the mere presence of the so-called translator/minder instils extreme fear in the interviewee. If someone says anything anti-Assad, then they will be arrested after giving an interview to a Western media outlet. A similar situation happened during the siege of Aleppo at the end of 2016. The video activists from Aleppo had covered the events in eastern Aleppo city for years with their camera, verified reporting of the protests, the funerals, siege, the barrel bombs and the forced evacuation in the end. Yet, when Western journalists entered western Aleppo city under the control of the Assad regime and with visas issued by the regime itself, it only chose those who were loyal to the Assad regime. They were enjoying their food and drink in the affluent part of Aleppo city, with their government minders, reporting about the ‘terrorists’ in the city. The only journalist who did report with help from the video activists from east Aleppo city, while herself located in west Aleppo city under regime control was

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the seasoned Swedish Middle East correspondent and good speaker of Arabic, Cecilia Uden, who had her visa revoked when she reported about the Aleppo siege in a Swedish newspaper.19

Actors in the Syrian war It is beyond the scope of this book to discuss in detail the background and history of each of the armed groups that were active in Syria between 2014 and 2016. However, this section gives a brief overview of the main groups active in the Syrian war to describe the geopolitical and mediatized context in which foreign journalists and video activists from Syria operate. In 2018, Syria was divided into four main areas under control of main actors currently fighting in the Syrian war (see Map 6.1). First is the territory under the control of the FSA and the Syrian National Coalition (SNC) with their headquarters in Gaziantep, Turkey. The FSA rebels are anti-Assad and were formed initially from defected regime army soldiers, who formed the Syrian Revolutionaries’ Front under the leadership of the Supreme Military Council under the Coalition of Revolutionary Forces. This territory also included pockets of areas in the north-west under control of Islamic militant groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra. There is a strong opposition from local Syrians against these extremist groups. Second is the territory under the control of the Assad regime, divided into the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), which also includes Russian troops, Iranian battalions under the leadership of Iranian General Qassem al-Suleimani, the Syrian Resistance and Hezbollah militias. Third is the territory of the Kurdish fighters and battalions who are part of the more or less autonomous region of Rojava, which means ‘West-Kurdistan’ in Kurdish. The largest military factions of the Kurdish forces are the People’s Protection Units or YPG (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, Kurdish), the armed wing of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) in Syrian Kurdistan, well known because of its strong connection to the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) led by Abdallah Öcalan. These Kurdish factions also have an unknown number of foreign fighters that increased after the start of the coalition bombings in October 2014. Last and fourth was the territory under the control of the foreign militants of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), consisting mainly of militants from around the Arab world (Iraq, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Libya), Eastern Europe and Asia (Chechnya, Bosnia, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan) and some from Europe (Germany, Denmark, the UK, France and the Netherlands). ISIS was fighting against all other factions – the

Arima

Khusham

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Map 6.1  Active actors in the Syrian war, documented as of 22 May 2018. Available at https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/List_of_armed_groups_in_the_Syrian_Civil_War#/media/File:Syrian_Civil_War_map.svg. CC License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Kafr Hawar

Rajo

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Syrian opposition, the Kurdish forces and the Assad regime. While the Syrian government for a long period has benefited from the fight of the IS against the opposition forces, the political and military opposition also remained continuously divided between secular and religiously motivated opposition groups. Several efforts to unify the opposition against the Assad regime and ISIS nationwide have largely failed, and jihadist groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra (JAN) and al-Qaeda-related militants like Jaysh al-Islam continued to fight against FSA battalions within the territory under the control of the opposition. Until summer 2017, the main stronghold of the ISIS was the Syrian city of Raqqa, but the concerted military assault on the city supported by the international coalition started in June 2017 and significantly reduced the territorial control of ISIS. The international coalition attacks on Raqqa were carried out indiscriminately, using phosphorous bombs and with severe and significant civilian losses.20 The first activist videos were shot voluntarily and with self-funding from family, friends and the neighbourhood; the video activists gathered funds to sustain their work and pay for the costs of materials and equipment. When this informal funding became more and more difficult to find, the video activists turned towards international funding. Some of them were supported by international aid and media organizations. Others managed to sell their footage to international networks and continue to provide some income for themselves. The main international news networks like CNN and Al Jazeera do not allow their Middle East correspondents into the non-government-controlled areas for insurance purposes and security reasons. Foreign correspondents rely on Assad-government-issued visas to enter Syria, and only under supervision of the minders from the MOI and embedded with Syrian Army officials for security reasons. Therefore, to get reports from opposition-held areas, the international networks relied on the services of international freelance war reporters. With Syria designated as one of the most dangerous countries for foreign journalists, many freelance war reporters and photographers took the individual risk of entering Syria from Turkey to be able to sell their material to international news networks when they return. Often, this is done with the help of the Syrian video activists inside the opposition-held areas as fixers. Video activists who have passports travelled back and forth between Syria and Turkey to meet international media freelancers in Gaziantep and assisted them in entering Syria. For those activists who do not have Syrian passports, their work and life exclusively took place inside Syria. Over the years, Syrian video activists developed an international network and professionalized their skills up to the point that they can raise some income



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for their families with their video-production work. This also reflects in the format and the style of the video clips themselves, which have become more edited and polished as well as offering a certain narrative. However, a major frustration for the video activists and media professionals working in the north of Syria was the lack of recognition by the same international networks while they took much more risk than any of the war reporters entering Syria. They faced kidnappings, death and a constant pressure of living in a war zone. But the Syrian grass-roots media centres grew from collectives of young enthusiastic IT students to professionalized organizations that provided content to Reuters and services to international news networks. This development reflects in their videos that have gone from YouTube videos with shaky footage to edited items with vox pops and sequences. The subjects are now little stories. They also used social media a lot; according to the activists, Facebook and Twitter were essential outlets for them: Facebook is very essential and their connection with Twitter. The more essential thing is the credibility of our footage. When the footage is credible and we film it without cutting or editing, we try to reach Reuters and international news agencies. In order for them to make sure the video was taken in Aleppo on – for instance – 22/8, a particular date. The title of the video should be clear, what it contains, in which neighbourhood, is there an idea behind it, we try in general to communicate through those social media tools; Facebook and Twitter, but with credibility. We want to create credibility for the centre we are working for. No exaggeration with numbers of casualties, and not to make up something that did not happen in reality. (Aleppo-based video activist, 2014)21

Their work as fixers for foreign freelance journalists also provided video activists with an income, besides subsidies they might have received from abroad for their own media centres, for example, from the International Media Support (IMS) organization located in Denmark. Some of the video activists worked with freelance journalists such as James Foley, who was later kidnapped and beheaded by the IS. Other freelancers such as the Swiss war reporter Kurt Pelda, Danish war journalist Nagieb Khaja and British-Syrian Rami Jarrah report from Syria regularly, assisted by the Syrian video activists from Aleppobased media centres. Few Syrian video activists managed to make a personal income by working for international agencies like Reuters directly. What initially started as an idealistic reason why they filmed and uploaded their footage has become a more pragmatic and practical reason; the income they received has

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also become one of the main factors for them to keep going, as it sustained their extended families, and some have their own families and newborn children to care for. The Syrian video activists took pride in their work, and some have clashed with international networks when, for example, they were offered high amounts of money for footage and interviews with IS fighters while there was no interest from foreign media for their own footage about daily struggles and war experiences of the Syrian civilians. Some of them squarely declined any of this political economy of the international media industry and refused to work with the international networks on this basis. One of the more professional dreams that the particular Syrian video activists from Aleppo shared with each other is the widening of their coverage and the professionalization of their video work. In their relationship with the international media, they often did not feel recognized as professionals while being treated as mere fixers. I started since the beginning of the revolution. I was filming the uprisings and protests I used to film since the beginning of the events the protests that were peaceful in the beginning (not clear) . . . With the development of the peaceful uprisings and demonstrations, after that I  moved to filming battles and FSA. I was filming since the beginning of the events. I started first with mobile phone. Then I  moved to filming with a camera. Now I  work for Reuters and have a professional camera. (Aleppo-based video activist, 2014)22

In 2012, in May, the Assad regime was still stronger in the countryside of Raqqa than in the city, so people came from the countryside to the city to demonstrate, and the activists filmed these protests with a live feed at an internet news channel for sixteen hours. A Raqqa activist explained, I worked with a video camera and a link to Mubasher. When we started to do the live feeds, around 14 channels came to us for footage; CNN, BBC, France24, all took our footage from the protests in Raqqa. We sent it to them through FTP and uploaded the footage. Then the army besieged Raqqa, we took the Assad statue from the roundabout and pulled it down. In one day, we had no martyrs. On 16 March 2013, the siege lasted for three days and we threw stones and they shot at us with AK 47 guns. We went out on the streets, we kept protesting, the fear was broken. We were with 70 or 80 people in one room and for 72 hours I did not sleep at all. I was full of energy and have filmed everything. My people were being killed and I needed the world to know this. (Raqqa-based video activist, 2014)23



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Due to the attraction of Syria as a war zone, eventually becoming the most dangerous country to report from ever, the cities of Gaziantep and Kilis became hubs for foreign journalists, lingering in the hotels, eagerly waiting to enter Syria. Many of the video activists were able to travel back and forth, and those who spoke English had an advantage over the others because they could make deals with foreign independent freelance journalists who wanted to enter Syria. The journey from Gaziantep to Aleppo regularly took fourteen to sixteen hours in 2014, including the border crossings – a trip that before the 2011 uprisings took only two and a half hours. The main reasons for this were the many checkpoints and southern back routes that taxis and cars have to take to avoid regime checkpoints and the checkpoints of the IS that were still present in the eastern part of the province. The fact that Syrian video activists could take this journey was important for their income, as some of the video activists received funding from international organizations who had a presence in Gaziantep and moreover also worked as fixers for the foreign media. In order to further develop and unite the media centres, a first general founding conference was organized in Aleppo for the establishment of the Union of Media Professionals on 21 July 2014, which included the media centres Nour Media and Aleppo Media Centre (AMC).24 The meeting was filmed and also uploaded on the Nour Media YouTube channel. The transparency of the decision-making process and the open discussions in this uploaded recording show the freedom that these video activists enjoyed. They would have never been able to do this kind of meeting and debate under the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Although content created by the Syrian video activists is sometimes used in reports by the international media, their material is not given the same recognition at the level of foreign war reporters and correspondents, despite the fact that Syrian journalists and media activists cover a much wider geographical area of Syria than the international media and have better access to the country. One of those examples of media discrepancy is the international coverage of the story of Kobani and the story of their resistance and fight against the IS. The international media focus on the fight against the IS increased after the international coalition campaign started the bombardment of IS strongholds in Raqqa in October 2014. Kobani is located in the northern part of Syria, close to the Turkish border and within easy reach of international correspondents without having to enter Syria. Kobani is hailed as a success story of Kurdish troops managing to push out the IS. However, many months before the international coalition started their bombing campaign in October 2014, the Syrian Revolutionaries Front (SRF) in cooperation with other factions such as the YPG and Islamic Front had

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successfully defeated and expelled ISIS in January 2014 from large swathes of areas in the Kurdish part of Afrin and large parts of the western part of Aleppo governorate. This important military event has never been widely covered by the international media, because the international coalition bombings had not started yet. Most staff reporters of the international media were careful not to enter the opposition-controlled areas of Syria due to security risks, or they enter Syria when they have gained a permit from the Syrian government and thus cover the crisis embedded with the Syrian Arab Army, which obviously brings its own peculiar subjectivity. News media producers aim to provide easily understood chunks of information, quickly answering the five Ws  – Where, What, Who, Why and When – and dichotomies greatly help in the simplification of news about the Other. Despite the common humanity and obvious multiplicity of the world we live in, people do like to divide the world into dichotomies; black–white, left–right, and one of the most favored dichotomies we repetitively find in news media is East–West. Edward Said emphasized that after the 9/11 attacks the supreme conceptual fictions of the ‘Orient’ and the ‘West’ are easily used to create fear, hatred and disgust about the ‘enemy-Other’, only became stronger.25 The Arab Uprisings seemed to disrupt this dichotomization. Western media publics watched young internet savvy protesters who did not fit the image of Arabs they knew from Hollywood films. Tunisia mesmerized Western media publics. The Egyptian Revolution grabbed attention with stories about how social media connected young people, and the Egyptian heavy metal singer Ramy Essam became known as the singer of the Egyptian Revolution. That was 2011. Much has changed since. In 2016, Egypt returned to an even worse totalitarian state and the brutal crackdown of the Syrian Revolution resulted into an all-out war on humanity. Using social media and the internet, groups like ISIS have manipulatively and ingeniously dominated and set the Western media-tone about the Arab uprisings and the Arab world in Western media. Their strategies have deepened the fictional rift between the Orient and the West, the same dichotomy that Edward Said describes above. The impact of the iconographic photo of the Syrian boy on the beach, leading to an increased attention and moving images of the Western ‘infidels’ welcoming ‘Muslim’ refugees on news networks in the fall of 2015 posed a short but important crisis for the ISIS propaganda machine. This crisis of the image of the West that ISIS so desperately wants to frame to their followers seemed to urge Europe-born jihadi terrorists to carry out attacks in the heart of Europe, and the attacks reached their objective. The fear of Muslim refugees is widely



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spread on our media. Collective discrimination of Muslims seems on the rise after each terrorist attack. Draconic anti-immigrant legislation and policies are being implemented. European anti-immigrant parties thankfully jump on the opportunity to gain political support and deepen the East-West dichotomy to justify their racist politics. In this dominating large-scale enterprise of mobilization of fear, hatred and disgust, however, there is a consistent audiovisual counter-narrative of revolution, humanness, suffering and resistance against oppression by authoritarian regimes like Assad and ISIS, and that is the narrative by grass-roots video activists from Syria; in their work and plethora of content, these film-makers break through the manipulated and fictional media dichotomy of ‘Orient’ and ‘West’. We see amateur mobile footage from a bomb attack in Paris or Brussels, and it is not usual that Western news broadcast networks say they cannot ‘verify this footage’; the audience immediately understands why people flee this bomb site, shocked by the news images. We see amateur digital video footage from Syria; the international news networks repeatedly state they cannot ‘verify this footage’, and the public wonders what is happening; it is often too complex and far from them, ‘unverified’, so it could be ‘fake’. There is a difference between saying ‘we cannot verify this footage’ and ‘amateur footage’ when activist films and footage are used in Western media. Think about it, someone takes a mobile phone to film the aftermath of a suicide attack in Paris. The evening news uses this footage in the reporting and adds the caption ‘we cannot verify this footage’ instead of ‘amateur footage’. Viewers will doubt the validity of the footage. If it has not been verified, it might be fake. This is how conspiracy theories are brought into the public space. Had the footage been designated as ‘amateur footage’, the suspicions about its validity would have been much less. The many Syrian video activists and film-makers alike did everything in their might to prevent that the television and Western media would take over by filming and documenting the Syrian Revolution themselves. By preventing that, some of them surfaced as extremely talented and brave war reporters and were eventually recognized for it. Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS) won the CPJ reporting prize. Hadi al-Abdallah reporting from Aleppo won a Rory Peck Award, and in 2017, Waad al-Kateab who reported the Aleppo siege and forced evacuation for the British Channel Four News was awarded a prestigious Emmy Award for her heroic reporting that showed the world what was really happening in Aleppo in 2016. She is the first Syrian ever to win an International Emmy Award.

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The trouble with non-Syrians making documentaries about Syria Syrian film-makers have produced a slate of absolutely wonderful documentary cinema since the start of the Syrian Revolution. There is an overlap between the Syrian documentary film-makers, who were professionals before the Syrian Revolution, and the young Syrian video activists, who had no prior experience as filmmakers. The film Last Men in Aleppo (2017) is a prime example of an excellent collaboration between a professional and young talented Syrian documentary film-maker, Firas Fayyad, and the video activists from the AMC. From all upcoming and talented film-makers outside the country, few remain under the radar of the Syrian regime. It can be safely said that all Syrian documentary film-makers who had experience with film-making at a professional level are currently outside of Syria, with the majority residing in Berlin, France and Northern Europe. Iconic documentaries have been made by Syrian documentary film-makers since 2013, such as Talal Derki’s Return to Homs (2013); Ossama Mohammed and Wiam Simav Bedirxan’s Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait (2014); Ammar al-Beik’s work; Alfoz Tanjour’s major documentaries Syria:  The Battle Beyond (2014), Death of Aleppo (2016) and most recently A Memory in Khaki (2016); Guevara Namer’s Morning Fears, Night Chants (2012); Hazem al-Hamwi’s From My Syrian Room (2014); Rafaat al-Zakout’s Home (2015); Ziad Kalthoum’s The Immortal Sergeant (2014) and the Taste of Cement (2017); Ziad al-Homsi’s Our Terrible Country (2014); Zaina Erhaim’s Syria’s Rebellious Women (2015); Sara Fatahi’s Coma (2015); Obaidah Zytoon’s The War Show (2016); Avo Kaprealians Houses without Doors (2016) and the seminal Last Men in Aleppo (2017) and many more documentary films in the pipeline from other talented Syrian documentary film-makers. These productions were often made in co-production with European or American producers, which sometimes led to conflict and disagreements between Syrian film-makers and foreign producers, co-directors and co-producers. Between Syrian documentary film-makers, relations have not been good, in particular when competition for production funds and income from the films is a muchvied-for commodity. The strained relationship between foreign media and Syrian video activists/ film-makers is also reflected in the industry of documentary film-making. This book does not describe the many documentaries about Syria directed by foreign non-Syrian directors, and it is certainly beyond its scope to discuss them all. But some note should be given on the trouble with non-Syrians making



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documentaries about Syria. There are many examples of good and professional collaborations between Syrian film-makers and foreign producers or directors. However, some foreign directors have only been interested in Syria because of the war and the violence and the sensationalism attached to covering it. Some of those documentaries utterly lack any geographical context or historical knowledge of the Syrian Revolution and focus exclusively on the extremist jihadi foreign fighters. For example, the documentary Dugma:  The Button (2016) by Norwegian journalist Paul Refsdal, which won the Norwegian Amanda Award for best documentary. Refsdal visited the front line in Syria with the help of Syrian fixers, where he interviewed would-be suicide bombers. None of the protagonists in the film are Syrians but all foreign jihadis, who came into Syria to join militant extremist groups related to Jabhat al-Nusra and al-Qaeda. The film was shot in the second half of 2014 and the beginning of 2015 and follows the daily life of those foreign fighters in Syria who decided to become suicide bombers. The documentary, filmed in Idlib, is a simplified and biased portrait of the Syrian war, as if all opposition in that area was extremist and al-Qaeda related. Refsdal stated that he hoped it would make people understand that ‘our enemies are human beings and they are not perfect human beings.’26 The problem with the film is the bias in the film and portrayal of opposition areas as solely controlled by extremist jihadis, even though Refsdal was confronted with the fact that the areas he travelled also had non-jihadi fighters; in fact, the majority of the Syrian opposition does not have anything to do with Jabhat al-Nusra or ISIS and, in particular, the video activists and film-makers regard these groups and the foreign jihadi fighters as a similar enemy as the Assad regime and ISIS. The documentary is a typical example of sensationalist reality entertainment; prior to the violence in Syria, when the foreign jihadis were not yet part of the conflict, film-makers like Refsdal were not interested in the Syrian Revolution and uprisings. When the foreign jihadis in Syria became the fetishism of Western news media, Refsdal decided to make a documentary in an area he had never visited or spoke the language of. Documentaries like Dugma:  The Button are gifts to the Assad-regime propaganda, which has a vested interest in labelling all Syrian opposition as extremist jihadis. The trouble with these kind of documentaries is that they frame an orientalist and dichotomized portrayal of the Syrian war and cannot be considered as a reliable documentation. Moreover, as none of the protagonists in this documentary are actual Syrians, it certainly does not give any voice to Syrians themselves.

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Another much revered documentary about Syria is A Syrian Lovestory (2015) by British film-maker Sean McAllister. Among others, the film won the 2015 Sheffield Grand Jury Award and was BAFTA nominated for Best Debut and BIFA Best Documentary. The film follows a Syrian activist couple in Damascus Amer and Raghda and is an intimate portrait of their daily lives and the early phase of the Syrian Revolution when the protests were organized in Damascus and Homs. It tells the story of their relationship, how they met in Assad’s prison cell years ago. McAllister started filming the couple in 2009 when Raghda was a political prisoner and Amer was at home. McAllister had pretended to be a tourist and filmed them in Yarmouk at the time. It is an intimate family portrait whereby Raghda and Amer have let Sean into their lives. Throughout the film, there is a feeling of amazement of the intimacy and access Sean gained to this couple, and at the same time an eerie feeling that it might be unethical to keep recording even when the couple fall apart and start fighting. As a viewer you definitely get the feeling that the director is not just a passive observer. Indeed, upon release of Raghda from prison, Sean himself is arrested, and the situation becomes extremely tense. The family is forced to flee to Lebanon from where they find asylum in France. Sean follows them in their new lives in France. The marriage falls apart, Raghda attempts suicide unsuccessfully. She moves to Turkey to work for the Syrian opposition government, while Amer is left alone with the children in France. After the end of the film, one cannot help but wonder what would have happened if Sean had not been there with his camera, in Syria, and how his intrusive filming has influenced the course of Amer’s and Raghda’s lives and marriage. Layla, a Syrian documentary film-maker who has been instrumental from the beginning of the Syrian Revolution, met Sean in Damascus, when he had returned to Syria in 2011. She recounted her experience with him: Do you know the director of the Syrian Love Story? His name is Sean McAllister. He came here at the end of the summer of 2011. He was pretending to be a tourist. There was a demonstration in Bab Sharki and he went there. In a week, every one of us knew he was foreign journalist. He wanted to go to the demonstrations in Homs and a group of my friends wanted to go as well to a demonstration. They wanted to pay their respects to a first paramedic who was killed during the demonstrations. Sean McAllister went along with them. He promised he would be quiet. But sure enough he was arrested by the mukhabarat soon after. Around 30 people had to leave because of this arrest, including myself. I  left for Lebanon and stayed away for a month and checked my name at the border



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several times. It was less risky for me. But for the family that he was filming, it was a very big risk and they had to leave because of his arrest. It was very bad. They had to leave everything behind and flee to save their lives. This was because of Sean McAllister. This was a Channel 4 Documentary so their producers were responsible. The family was in a way compensated by Channel 4, they got some kind of financial aid I think, but because of Sean’s stupidity, he had caused their exile. (Layla, 8 May 2017)27

Foreign and non-Syrian film-makers often fail to assess the severe and fatal implications that directing documentary films in Syria could have for the protagonists who are identifiable in their films. Letters from Yarmouk (2014) is a documentary film directed by the Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi, who is based in Ramallah, on the occupied West Bank. The film, similar to Silvered Water by Ossama Mohammed, is based around the Skype conversations that the director, Rashid Masharawi, has with a video activist and cameraman in Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp near Damascus. The cameraman, Niras Said, approached Rashid Masharawi, who asks him to film and send him footage. The conversation is a story within the story of besieged Yarmouk. Harrowing images of starvation, bombardments and suppression. However, although it is very clear that Niras Said is an anti-regime activist, not once in the entire film is Assad mentioned as the main perpetrator of the misery that had befallen Yarmouk camp. Yarmouk camp suffered daily aerial bombardments by the Syrian regime army, MiGs and other warplanes targeted civilian areas and breadlines, at the same time imposing a tight siege on Yarmouk that caused a terrible humanitarian catastrophe there. The largest Palestinian camp in Syria had been under this brutal siege since July 2013.28 The film was distributed worldwide, and the director, Masharawi, travelled around the world to take credit for the film. Masharawi made the film to be watched or heard, to the plight of the people of Yarmouk. But in the Q&As after the screenings, he stopped short of implicating the Syrian regime. He was sitting on the fence. For Niras Said, the film was made for Palestinians. He explained to Budour Hassan, For so long we Palestinians have been trying to convince Westerners of the justice of our cause. But this film is aimed at telling our fellow Palestinians about what’s going on in Yarmouk. We do feel that we have been let down. We always insist that the Palestinian people should be unified, but we feel that Yarmouk has been ostracized.29

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Niras dedicates this film to his best friend Hassan Hassan, a young PalestinianSyrian actor who died in the torture chambers of a regime prison. Niras is critical to the humanitarian discourse only focusing on the starvation of Yarmouk: Even media outlets run by the Syrian regime circulated pictures of starving children in the camp because for them, our plight sells . . . We are not, however, begging for charity. We want an end to the siege imposed by the regime, release of our detainees held in Syrian regime prisons since the start of the uprising, and anyone who committed a crime, killing or torture to be held accountable.30

The film was screened at festivals around the world, with Masharawi attending Q&As. At the same time, Niras Said is clearly recognizable in the film, with his name, his identity very obvious. After the film had been shown at various festivals, among others, the Malmö Arab Film Festival and screenings in Stockholm on 9 May 2015, his name and face were well known, including the Yarmouk piano player who features in the film. As Budour Hassan explains in her article, The film Letters from Yarmouk was touring the world and the director Rashid Masharawi was collecting awards. The film would not have been possible had it not been for the photography and work of Niras from inside the camp under extremely dangerous conditions. I  asked Niras if it bothered him that he did all the hard work but that someone else was getting the credit. He replied: ‘The camp was destroyed and my friends were killed; I  couldn’t care less about receiving credit for a film.31

However, with his identity well known, he ran the great risk of being arrested. After the film had toured around Europe, Said was arrested by regime security forces on 2 September 2015 and became one of the thousands of PalestinianSyrian prisoners in Syria, languishing in the torture chambers of Assad.32 In 2018, Niras Said was found to have died in the custody of the Syrian regime.

7

To tell the world! Evidencing war crimes and virtual reality

Introduction One of the main reasons why the Syrian video activists uploaded their footage on YouTube and took these high risks was to create compassion and solidarity, and they hoped that action will flow from this. It is transnational. They want to show the world what is happening to them. But YouTube is a mass media platform and it has not created the action or the empathy that the Syrian video activists hoped for. They searched for other formats to tell their stories in different ways. In the same spirit of the great Syrian master and pioneer of cinema techniques, Nazih Shahbandar, who dreamt of one day making a 3D film, grass-roots video activists and film-makers from Syria have been at the forefront of innovative use of video technology. In order for them to tell the world their story, they have used their mobile phones to the maximum and experimented with all kinds of digital audiovisual technology such as drone technology and 360-degree video cameras and virtual reality (VR). The video activists undertook anything to document reality in front of their eyes, with the main purpose of evidencing war crimes for future justice. This chapter looks at the various forms of innovation that has taken place within the Syrian video activist and film-maker community and assesses the effectiveness of the use of digital video and YouTube for the documentation and evidencing of war crimes. An initiative that developed during the Syrian Revolution innovatively using the potential of mobile phones as a main tool of resistance is the Syrian Mobile Phone Film Festival.1 The festival grew out of the grass-roots film-maker and activist collective Al-Share3 (The Street), which produced the very first Arabiclanguage documentary about the Syrian Revolution, Smuggling 23 Minutes of Revolution (2011). Filmed in June 2011 and directed by Amer Matar, this film focuses primarily on the events in Hama before the entry of the Syrian Army. The

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film records the masses of protesters who came together in Hama, site of the 1982 massacre carried out by Hafez al-Assad. Over 50,000 people protested on 3 June 2011, carrying an effigy of Bashar al-Assad on the gallows and shouted ‘this is not 1982 anymore, we want dignity and freedom’.2 The same day, Assad’s security forces shot sixty-seven protesters dead, which was recorded on many mobile phones. The documentary film Smuggling 23 Minutes of Revolution (2011) was broadcast on Al Arabiya TV and also screened in several film festivals in Paris, Berlin and Brussels. The film was produced by the organization Al-Share3 for Media and Development whose core team members and founders are the brothers Amer and Mezar Matar, Nashwan Marzook and Amro Khito.3 All four are young Syrian documentary directors and producers. Al-Share3 is now a non-profit media foundation that is licensed in France. Focused on human rights, Al-Share3 foundation’s mission is to carry out media activities both inside and outside Syria to defend the freedom of media, by using various media tools. It was founded in February 2010, with a media campaign to support the displaced people from the north-eastern part of Syria, who had to flee their farmlands because of the extended droughts. The Mobile Phone Film Festival originated from the experiences of these Syrian activists. Most of them were located in the Turkish town of Gaziantep in 2014 and were connected in their work for Al-Share3.4 On a warm afternoon in the summer of 2014, I meet Amro Khito at Bayahzan Restaurant in Gaziantep, Turkey. He invited me over to have a drink, smoke some argileh and talk about his film projects and work with Al-Share3. Amro did not have a lot of work, because the big international media networks had stopped sending their journalists after the beheading of James Foley. I have not much work, actually. Amro is from Zabadani, a town in the Damascus countryside. Through a variety of events, he ended up in the Turkish city of Gaziantep. In 2014, he still was travelling back and forth into Syria, to the Free Syrian Army (FSA)-controlled areas. He tells me that before the Syrian Revolution he was a journalist with the Syrian financial magazine Al Iqtisadia. He did not engage in videography too much before the revolution except as hobby at his university. He explains, Before the revolution all videographers were wedding photographers. This has changed a lot, now everyone can take up a camera and there are many more video film-makers. At university, I had been filming. When we saw on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter what happened in Tunisia and Egypt, we got inspired.

Inspired by the Arab uprisings, he started to organize a demonstration inside the Souq Hamidiyyeh in the Old City of Damascus, which would take place on



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March 2011. ‘There were YouTube clips uploaded to get people to demonstrate on this date.5 This demonstration gathered around twenty people and it came on the news at Al Jazeera, they were using our footage.’6 On 25 March 2011, Amro and his friends helped organize a demonstration for Dera’a in Zabadani. After that he was wanted by the regime and he did not return to Damascus. He consequently quit his job with the financial newspaper in Damascus and started to work with the Local Coordination Committee (LCC) of Zabadani. He was together with his friends Mezar and Amer Matar, who were also working with the LCC. Zabadani eventually became the first Syrian town entirely under the control of opposition forces. There was a growing group of film-makers and documentary producers from Damascus, who started to work with international broadcasters and human rights activists. This included working with Syrian activist human rights lawyer Razan Zaitouneh and the Violations Documentation Center (VDC) and Lina Sinjab, the only Syrian reporter for BBC who was born and raised in Damascus and worked since 2004 as a Middle East correspondent. Lina had managed access to Zabadani early on. She went on covering protests in Homs and other places of revolution in Syria for the BBC. She covered peaceful protests inside Damascus, Douma and experienced the military insurgency in her own neighbourhood of Jobar. Eventually, in 2013, she had to leave her homeland indefinitely but continued reporting from London and Beirut.7 By August 2011, Amro was a wanted man. He was at home when the secret police, the mukhabarat, came to his parents’ house, but he had put ‘eyes on the street’, so he knew they were coming and he fled the house. They arrested his brother instead and told his mother that they wanted Amro. After some time, the mukhabarat came back to the house and told his sister-in-law that they would release his brother if they turned himself in. But they came back at the moment Amro had his backpack ready and was going out to film. They came searching for him with around thirty men; he ran from the house up to a high place in the village to look out. He started filming the police officers. But a neighbour who looked down from his balcony saw him and started shouting to the policemen, who came running after Amro, and then started shooting at him. ‘I ran like crazy, and I  forgot that my backpack was still open so I  lost my wallet, my passport, my driver’s license and my camera, everything. I had to stop and then they arrested me and brought me to the prison.’ Amro continued, My mother went crazy and started shouting in front of our house. After ten days, I was released because my uncle has friends in high places but I had to come

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back for one day to visit the political department and sign a declaration that I would not attend any demonstrations anymore. I didn’t go there but instead went into hiding in Zabadani, which was then freed from the regime. I  was in hiding for a year. I thought to myself, whatever it costs, I should shoot the demonstrations, otherwise nobody is going to know about them. I really didn’t want to get arrested. I had so much fear. Imagine how much fear I had in the very first souq Hamidiyyeh demonstration, how afraid I was to film the protest and take out my camera. It was so very shaky. The police and mukhabarat came with tens of buses to crack down on the demonstration. They arrested people and I have filmed it. I still have it; I recorded the first arrest filmed in Syria in the revolution. I haven’t used it yet, it is not important right now. It is about the message, there is a lot of video material out there now. Every day there are new uploads online. If I have the chance I will still film inside Syria. I also put my ‘eyes’, this is how I call my people inside Syria, in Zabadani. I went to Kafr Nbel in Idlib, to train young people in video production and how to use a mobile phone for filming. This is how we started the Syrian Mobile Phone Filmfestival . . . Now I am in Gaziantep, and I use social media a lot for my work and for uploading videos, I  have two channels, from the beginning, one has 200,000 subscriptions. I still use a fake name, because in the beginning of the revolution, I was a wanted person and I was working with the LCCs, Sham News Network and I had many friends in the FSA.8

When the police arrested Amro, they released his brother and started interrogating Amro. They accused him of working for Al Jazeera Arabic and that he was uploading video material on YouTube. They asked him about the Zabadani Facebook group, where he was a member using his real name. They insisted that Amro was Abdel, the administrator of the group. They interrogated Amro for days. His mother in Zabadani got very worried and sick. His father was trying everything to get him out. Eventually, he was released because of the connections of his uncle. He received back his camera, his driver’s license and his wallet but not his passport. When he came home, he discovered that the secret police had not deleted his footage; instead, they had taken selfies but not deleted it. They clearly had no clue how to use the camera. He remembers that these low-level officers often know nothing about communication technology. Amro told me, ‘There are lots of stories about the stupidity of the mukhabarat. No brains but only violence. One friend had his computer with him and at a checkpoint they damaged it so he could not use his Facebook anymore and then they let him go.’ In 2012, Amro moved to Beirut but since it was still close to Syria and he did not feel safe in Lebanon, he continued to Turkey and Gaziantep to work



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on his films and support fellow video activists. He has been working on some interesting new project involving mobile phones:  We organized mobile phone film-making workshops in Kafr Nbel and Idlib province . . . This is something new, the first time we organize it. It is for all Syrians and it is not about how professional or polished it looks but it is about the message. We want to make it every year and have more workshops inside Syria. We had 11 applications for the grant from video activists inside Syria. We organized 4 workshops in Syria, in Idlib, during a two-month period this year. I enjoyed this project very much and look forward to the launch.

The first edition of the Syrian Mobile Phone Film Festival took place in 2014, with screenings focused inside Syria, in collaboration with a street festival that activists had been organizing to commemorate the start of the Syrian Revolution. The Mobile Phone Film Festival ran from 1 to 3 October and screened in four cities throughout Syria and six cities in Europe. Amro and his fellow festival organizers, Amer and Mezar Matar, regard the mobile phone camera as the main tool of resistance and the struggle for freedom of expression. In many cases, indeed, only mobile phone footage provided audiovisual evidence that particular events took place or human rights were abused, atrocities and protests, sometimes secretly recorded from the pockets of activists.9 They started organizing a Syrian Street Festival and an online competition to encourage activists to submit short films filmed with their mobile phones. It soon became a platform and attracted interest of outside funders in Gaziantep, to start training Syrian activists and film-makers in film-making with their mobile phones.10 This training took place in Gaziantep and partly inside Syria. In 2015, Al-Share3 invited BAFTA-nominated British-Syrian film-maker Yasmin Fedda to Gaziantep to give a training course to Syrian activists. They gathered twelve participants who still lived in Syria and never had made a film before. Yasmin coordinated the workshop and mentored the participants during the workshops, where they learned how to use their mobile phones while documenting their daily lives. Yasmin explains, The films themselves provide an opportunity to listen to the stories of regular people across Syria, or displaced from it, and to witness the everyday realities that many are facing: barrel bombs dropped by the Syrian government, rockets from Russian attacks, torture, and destruction. Despite, or in spite of, these difficulties, there is the will to create and to get their stories out to the world.11

In 2016, the Syrian Mobile Phone Film Festival had grown to be an international film festival that not only screens inside Syria but also Turkey and

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Berlin. It showed thirty-three mobile films, sixteen from outside Syria, six had a small grant and eleven were produced during the Pixel workshop that Yasmin Fedda gave in Gaziantep. The festival and foundation offers grants, awards and training programs for Syrian directors who make low-budget, mobile documentary films.12 There are many challenges faced by young film-makers in Syria who want to make mobile documentary films. When I asked Amro in which areas of Syria it is most free to film without interference, he explained that in all areas of Syria, film-makers face difficulties. That is why many of them left and are now in exile. It is virtually impossible to film a documentary in regime-controlled areas without being suspected of spying. Much of that work is in utter secrecy, as well as anything in ISIS-controlled areas. In the Kurdish-controlled areas, Arab filmmakers might face harassment. The areas where film-makers are most free to film inside Syria are the FSA-controlled areas. But that freedom is related to the proximity of extremist groups. The closer these are, the more film-makers feel their film activities heavily restricted. For example, in Idlib, Syrian video activists might face difficulties with the extremist Islamist factions who are controlling pockets there. When Aleppo was besieged and the population forcibly displaced by the end of 2016, a significant number of video activists, among others, from Aleppo Media Centre (AMC), fled to Idlib, while one part went to Turkey and beyond. In January 2017, I had many Skype conversations with them, and some told me that Idlib was extremely restricted for them to film; they felt threatened. They wanted to leave for Turkey and eventually Europe. For everything, they needed to get a permission from Jabhat al-Nusra, who were regularly checking and even kidnapped some video activists. These developments were detrimental to a free and independent media inside Syria. The AMC eventually decided to work mainly from the town of A’zaz, near the Turkish border where they were not harassed. Amro moved from Zabadani to Idlib countryside and managed to get into the revolutionary town of Kafr Nbel, famous for its revolutionary cartoons.13 Here, the revolutionaries were secular and constantly resisting jihadis from Jabhat al-Nusra who wanted to take over the town. While sipping from his tea in Gaziantep, Amro describes how he entered Kafr Nbel:  Raed Fares and fighters helped me to get into Kafr Nbel. These people are openminded people, I call Raed Fares jokingly ‘the President of the Republic of Kafr Nbel’. I was there last month. It is still suffering under barrel bombs, not so much as before but the Assad regime is still targeting from the air. They are brave people, they fought off both the regime and the ISIS extremists. The people of



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Kafr Nbel are called the ‘Fursan al Haq’, the Knights of Justice. The best of all fighters and most are from the brigades of Kafr Nbel. My best experience was to work with them inside the liberated areas. Now, in fact it is a bit of the worst experience, because I am far from Syria.

At the time in 2014, when I spoke to Amro in Gaziantep, his mother and sister were in Lebanon, but his father did not want to leave and stayed in Zabadani and his brothers in Damascus and Wadi Barada. Amro showed me photos of his family house in Zabadani, utterly destroyed by shelling, looking like it is not finished yet. His father moved with the people; he was fifty-six and still in very good health. Every time there was a shelling, the people moved to different places in the town to avoid the shelling. The area was under complete siege. Amro continued, It’s a total siege, so I tell my dad that he should leave, there is no future. But he doesn’t. He is stubborn. He is still in Zabadani with my grandmother, I think they are protected by God or something because they always manage to stay alive.

Three young friends of Amro, connected to Al-Share3, Amer Matar, Mezar Matar and Abdallah Hakawati had also been active prior to the Syrian Revolution in providing charity and aid to the displaced from Hassakah and the north-east who were camping around Damascus in 2009 and 2010, together with Bassel Shehadeh and his friends. The Mezar brothers and Abdallah Hakawati eventually fled to Gaziantep where they collaborated on the film project False Alarm (2014). It is a documentary deposit of digital video memories of the war in north-west Syria.14 In False Alarm, Abdallah Hakawati tells the story how he lost his friend Mustafa in Aleppo, in an aerial bomb attack, directly after a demonstration that he had filmed. The Mezar brothers are searching for their brother who disappeared in Raqqa. False Alarm (2014) is a story of a revolutionary spirit that was lost and overpowered by its own multiplicity. It is a story about revolution, exile, death, hope, victory and defeat. The young friends are filming each other’s journeys while using their cameras as the only proof of existence. As memories of a country that has become unrecognizable for its citizens. The film is an emotional rollercoaster of tears and laughter. It is not clear if they are happy they found their freedom or if the revolution that they invested in so much is actually representing them. They have all lost their closest friends and relatives and are standing in the rubbles of a revolution that is increasingly being taken over by extremists who have nothing to do with the original idea that these three friends had about their revolution for freedom.

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The brothers were all involved in video activism inside Aleppo. A lot of their footage was taken up by international news agencies and broadcast worldwide. Among others, Abdallah Hakawati recorded a video clip in the district of Bustan al-Qasr in Aleppo during daily bombings, which later became known as the Freedom Song Girl. In the clip, recorded on 16 November 2012, a young girl sings a famous revolutionary song about freedom, during a protest in Aleppo. She is repeatedly singing her hope for freedom when she is suddenly interrupted by a deadly bomb blast that erupts behind her.15 This video clip went viral and was shared worldwide, up to a point that Abdallah Hakawati lost total control over where the clip was being distributed. Amro explains to me, ‘They took away our names and the logo of Bidayyat, everything. This is a big problem until now. It seems we don’t have any rights when we upload it on YouTube. It really depends on the person, whether they treat us with respect.’ When the Freedom Song Girl video went viral, it was worldwide and was picked up by many different international news agencies. Eventually, the clip caught the attention of Nonny de la Peña, a pioneer media artist from California. De la Peña is from the University of Southern California (USC) and has been at the forefront of the use of VR technology in documentary and journalism. She has developed the so-called Immersive Journalism, which is a form of media production that allows first-person experience of the events or situations described in news reports and documentary film.16 De la Peña shares the concern that the overload of audiovisual information available today desensitizes audiences who then become indifferent to the suffering of others, and she predicts that the role of Immersive Journalism could reinstitute the audience’s emotional involvement in current events.17 The first-person experience is generated by the use of a headmounted display, which places the user in a virtual 3D environment that will give an embodied experience.18 De la Peña has been using the VR technology to re-enact news events into a 3D virtual situation and environment to which users respond realistically. Nonny de la Peña noticed the video of the Freedom Song Girl recorded by Abdallah Hakawati and used the video clip to develop a VR experience. Commissioned by the World Economic Forum, de la Peña’s ‘Project Syria’ addresses the flight of child refugees in Syria.19 The VR experience starts with a computer-generated reconstruction of the Freedom Song Girl video clip, all further elements in the VR experience are taken from the actual audio, video and photographs taken on the scene. The VR experience was exhibited during the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos on 21 January 2014 with the goal of compelling world leaders to act on the Syrian refugee crisis. The budget for Project Syria was $285,000.



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Figure 7.1  Participants in a workshop at Copenhagen in 2015 experiencing Project Syria with a VR headset. Photo: J. I. Wessels.

This piece was requested to be displayed at the WEF by the executive chairman Klaus Schwab, in Davos on 21 January, with the idea of compelling world leaders to act on this crucial issue. In 2015, participants in an academic workshop at Copenhagen University were given the opportunity to experience ‘Project Syria’ presented by one of the main programmers (see Figure 7.1), and most reacted very emotionally to the experience. A trailer and analysis of the VR experience is available online.20 The WEF exhibition generated an enormous interest and emotional reactions; the exhibition that later followed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London drew the highest number of reactions ever on an installation in the museum’s history. The question, of course, arises as to whether the VR project indeed led to concerted action from the world leaders at Davos to try to stop the ongoing war in Syria. It did not. Moreover, Abdallah Hakawati, who initially shot the footage of the Freedom Song Girl, has never been approached by the project to ask permission to use his clip. This indicates the discrepancy between image producers on the ground and those outside who pick up the image in order to re-format and use in a different setting without actually acknowledging the contribution of the image producer. In this case, de la Peña explained that it was

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difficult for them to trace who had been the original owner and image producer (Hakawati).21 In another situation, also from Aleppo, in 2014 British film-maker Christian Stephen of RYOT connected with video activists from AMC inside Syria to film with an innovative camera that was able to record 360-degree video. It consisted of a rig with six GoPro cameras which recorded 360-degree video in real-time, which could then be experienced and watched by a user using a head-mounted set, like the Oculus Rift headset. Moreover, in 2015 YouTube enabled uploads of 360-degree videos and this led to the first ever 360-degree video footage from a war zone, this one from Aleppo, entitled Welcome to Aleppo.22 This kind of technology had been the ultimate dream for Syrian cinema pioneer Nazih Shahbandar; it is an extremely sad case that it needed a war to introduce this technology to Syria. Video activists in Aleppo possessed the same inner drive to improve and innovate as did their pioneering fellow Syrian film-maker Nazih Shahbandar. In order for them to fully make use of the digital and cutting-edge technology available, video activists from Aleppo also started to use drone technology to document the vast destruction of their neighbourhood (see Figure 7.2). These long shots were also uploaded on YouTube and consequently taken up by major broadcast news networks. From viral to virtual reality, the

Figure  7.2  Monther Entaky and his colleagues from Aleppo Media Centre (AMC) operating a drone camera over Aleppo city in 2016 © M. Khattab.



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grass-roots video footage production has been hailed as a useful and effective tool to document and evidence war crimes and the destruction of war. But the challenges to compile a body of evidence of war crimes are indeed significant. To assess how effective the use of digital video and YouTube, in the following section we assess the many different forms and types of output that has been uploaded on YouTube. Providing a conceptual categorization of online digital video in eight different categories, I  will focus on the value of digital video for future transitional justice (TJ) in Syria. The assessment is based on the observation of 400 YouTube clips between 2014 and 2016.

Grieving death, digital memories and evidence of war crimes Askanius identified three major roles for online videos in her work on anticapitalist video activism:  (1) an archive of action and activist memory, (2)  commemoration in an online environment for grieving death and (3)  a space to provide and negotiate visual evidence of police violence and state repression; ‘Vast amounts of videos documenting street violence and narrating political resistance from a citizen gaze are uploaded onto YouTube every day.’23 This section takes into account the three major roles of activist videos as identified by Askanius, while posing the following question: What is the value of the available user-generated content (UGC) on YouTube in the constitution of legal evidence for TJ? To answer this question, this section analyses how digital videos from Syria have been introduced and integrated in the human rights and media discourses on the ‘power of the camera’ and ‘citizen journalists’ as eyewitnesses of atrocities. The next section critically reflects how the evidentiary value of new technology and digital media is emphasized and unravels a categorization of the many different types of online video clips available on YouTube since 2011 in relation to the Syrian conflict, based on a media-ethnography of 400 online YouTube clips that were surveyed between 2014 and 2015. In the last section, a video categorization will be used to assess the value of the available UGC on YouTube in the constitution of legal evidence for TJ. For many video activists on the ground, the primary reason they started filming was to ‘tell the world’ what was happening in their neighbourhood but not necessarily to provide legal evidence; rather, the urge to film came from a place of moral outrage.

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I didn’t think of using my video collection as evidence, this was not the thing on my mind when I started filming. I filmed my feelings and wanted to document my neighbourhood, my area. I filmed a lot of injured people and martyrs and bombings but not with in the back of my mind to be able to use it as evidence. But I think there is so much around now that it should be possible to provide evidence and incriminate everyone who has committed crimes, we know who threw the bombs and at what time and how. (Amro Khito, 2014)24

Filming to ‘tell the word’, can be understood in a variety of ways and does not necessarily indicate a desire to build an archive of legal evidence. First, the fact that international media access was extremely limited to the areas where activists lived, motivated many of them to pick up a camera. Second, some activists picked up a camera when they themselves experienced and observed direct violence of the war, such as aerial bombardments or sniper fire. The filming could be explained as expressions of moral outrage whereby activists use the camera as a tool to direct their rage at the perpetrators and the outside world. Moral outrage is a special type of anger, caused by the observation of the mistreatment of others, violation of their rights and the violation of a moral norm or principle (not to hurt, rape, kill, bomb or shoot at others) by others, which then motivates the observer to speak up and take action.25 When moral outrage about a war crime is shared between Syrians and audiences, publics outside Syria, it can unite people in defiance and protest. Third, another reason that motivated Syrian video activists was the sudden occurrence of extraordinary events in their daily life. During the first phase of the Syrian Revolution, filming happened spontaneously and reactionary, no specific documentation strategy was prepared. The majority of the YouTube footage in the first period of the Syrian uprisings consists of activist recordings of street protests to serve as a digital memory of a unique revolutionary event and not specifically as legal evidence. These videos also correlate with the first role that Askanius identifies as online videos being an archive of action and activist memory, to document the street protests. When the events turned violent and the regime crackdown deepened, using live ammunition and bombings, the videos went beyond everyday photography or activist memory and became tools to express moral outrage and eventually document the suffering and consistent war crimes. This relates to the two other roles identified by Askanius, namely, a digital vehicle to commemorate martyrs and grieve death and a space to provide and negotiate visual evidence of violence and repression. Videos of funerals and extreme violence increasingly started



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to appear online, armed opposition groups would capture regime thugs (a.k.a. shabihha), who carried personal phones.26 Mobile phone footage from shabihha contained self-recorded and/or perpetrated torture and violence against civilians or FSA fighters, which was consequently uploaded on YouTube to provide evidence. For example, the YouTube channel ‘Syrian Revolution in Languages of the World (SRLW)’ is an anti-Assad channel that uploaded mobile phone footage from captured Assad-regime soldiers and other self-incriminating video evidence of war crimes perpetrated by the regime army. Opposition video activists would also film and document the aftermath of aerial bombardments and massacres, such as those in Houla in 2012, Ariha market and Rasm al-Nafl in 2013. Digital video footage also emerged documenting armed rebel groups committing human rights violations such as torture, summary execution of prisoners and beheadings. Sometimes YouTube uploads primarily served as intimidating messages to victims; the clearest case in Syria were the videos by Syrian regime supporters of summary executions of rebels (often called ‘nusra terrorist rats’ and other animal references) or jihadi videos by ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra and other extremist factions, of beheadings uploaded by perpetrators themselves to intimidate their victims. The videos show that violence is committed in Syria by all sides in the conflict, but most poignantly the recordings of state violence perpetrated by the Assad regime are presented as evidence of war crimes. The regime has been employing a kaleidoscope of violence which has been documented by video activists, including sniper fire, executions, massacres, tortures to death, detention and indiscriminate bombardment using a wide range of weaponry from chemical weapons, cluster bombs, scud rockets, incendiary bombs and barrel bombs.27 The consistent denial of the systematic nature of the regime violence by Bashar al-Assad is a key element in the media discourse of the regime.28 YouTube videos of regime-staged interviews are introduced in online media discourses; they become vehicles to claim a ‘truth’ about what is really happening on the ground in Syria, to counter and debunk the opposition activists’ uploads leading to a battle of the digital images online and vice versa. The main argument introduced by Assad-supporters against UGC by opposition video activists is that their videos are faked, therefore do not provide proof or evidence of war crimes perpetrated by the regime. However, Syrian state media and indeed Assad himself during media interviews both with foreign news agencies and pro-Assad Syrian channels, such as Al Dounia TV, regularly refer to Syrian military operations as ‘national cleansing operations’, which clearly indicates genocidal justification. When analysing video clips and YouTube content of channels supportive of the regime, much of the rhetoric is indeed focused on the utter destruction of

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the opponents of the regime who are dehumanized and labelled as ‘terrorists, vermin, cockroaches, beasts, apes and pigs’ and ‘purification of Syria’ from these opponents as moral justification of the mass violence that the regime has unleashed against Syrian civilians.29 Digital video has thus become a central tool in media discourses about which ‘truth’ in the Syrian conflict prevails, between those supportive of the Assad regime, the secular opposition against the Assad regime and the more extremist factions such as Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State militants, whereby those supportive of the Assad regime try to portray all those in the opposition as terrorists and Islamic extremists. But a ‘truth’ in a digital video does not necessarily reflect reality and in some cases digital video has indeed been blatantly faked. One of the advantages of online and social media is the immediate verification of content by many different online actors (Twitter, Reddit, Facebook users). One of the examples is an interview with a supposed jihadi extremist from the al-Qaedalinked Jabhat al-Nusra by the German journalist Todenhöfer on 17 September 2016, which was aired by Russian State Television. Online activists and Reddit users and other investigative journalists quickly exposed the interview as having been staged inside regime-controlled territory with a regime supportive commander dressed up as a Jabhat al-Nusra leader. The Syrian revolt has led to possibly the widest range of digital and social media content produced, reproduced, rehashed and distributed through a variety of actors ranging from political activists, witnesses, military staff, torturers, foreign media professionals and many more, which provides a vast archive of visual material that is of great scholarly importance.30 The recordings of violence that can be considered crimes against humanity have tremendous value for the sociological study of mass violence and the role of perpetrators because the type of footage is unprecedented, and many perpetrators are visible.31 In the transformation, online UGC from Syria from spontaneous videos of extraordinary revolutionary events to recordings of mass violence as evidence, international human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Witness, have worked tirelessly to collect and assess digital video as evidence.

Online digital video as a ‘game changer’ for evidencing war crimes UGC videos from Syria have been introduced in media and human rights discourses as having an enormous potential to provide legal documentation



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that could serve as ‘critical evidence in future criminal trials.’32 But there is a difference between a ‘video recording’ and a ‘legal truth’, and they do not necessarily coincide. This requires a critical discussion of the production of ‘legal truth’ and ‘legal evidence’. In their article on the work of human rights NGOs in refugee camps in Chad to collect evidence of war crimes in Darfur, legal experts Aradau and Hill discuss the role of five hundred children’s drawings for an analysis of visuality and conflict, navigating humanitarian and legal realms.33 The International Criminal Court (ICC) accepted these drawings as contextual evidence for war-crime trials against Sudanese officials. What is important to realize is that the children’s drawings per se do not constitute legal evidence but, in combination with the interviews done by workers of Human Rights Watch with children-witnesses and corroboration with other evidencing visuals, such as photography and satellite imagery, the visuals are extremely valuable.34 Only then do the drawings have a potential to serve as evidence for TJ. A  similar challenge can be identified for the use of UGC on YouTube. TJ is generally accepted as a key step in future peace building and conflict transition.35 According to the International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), TJ refers to ‘a set of judicial and non-judicial measures that have been implemented by different countries in order to redress the legacies of massive human rights abuses. These measures include criminal prosecutions, truth commissions, reparations programs, and various kinds of institutional reforms.’ Due to the practical challenges, most TJ organizations plea for holistic approaches that encompass and consider a full range of factors and circumstantial events and fact recordings that may have contributed to the violations and abuses. The general consensus is that there is no single solution for TJ. In the case of Syria, several initiatives for TJ are documenting human rights violations and war crimes: the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry into human rights violations in Syria, the Violations Documentations Center (VDC) and the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre (SJAC). The latter consists of TJ experts and practitioners and was set up specifically to provide guidance on TJ and documentation issues. The SJAC facilitates a network of Syrian organizations working on documenting violations, accountability, TJ and supporting a democratic transition in Syria. The SJAC ‘collects and preserves documentation of violations of human rights, humanitarian, and international criminal law in Syria in order to facilitate TJ and accountability efforts.’ The objectives of the SJAC are threefold: (1) to remind perpetrators that they will be held accountable one day, (2) to prevent recurrence of war crimes in a future Syria and (3) to ensure the narratives of the victims are documented for TJ and

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historical archives. Within the framework of TJ, the SJAC open-software database archives videos, pictures, documents and Syria-specific metadata such as source, location, time, types and methods of violations and actors involved, with both Arabic and English interfaces. Visuals are important entries in the SJAC database; when a Syrian photographer, known as ‘Caesar’, defected from the Assad regime with 55,000 photographs of more than 11,000 victims of systematic torture by the Syrian security forces, a renewed call for TJ in Syria emerged focused on indictment of the Syrian Assad-regime officials and leadership.36 The existence of the SJAC opens up an opportunity for the enormous number of online videos from Syria to be considered as potential evidence of war crimes. Cole emphasizes that most important for documenting violence and human rights abuses is the recording of proof of the date, time and geographical location (meta-tagging) in order to verify and corroborate crucial facts in the video.37 With the use of smartphones, Cole assesses, citizens are increasingly equipped with technology to push for accountability.38 Western narratives initially framed and celebrated citizen journalism and digital video activism in repressive contexts as ultimate vehicles for mobilization and democratization, in the end leading to social justice for the victims of the oppression.39 However, this argument, which has been greatly pushed by international media and organizations working on human rights and democratization, can also create a false sense of protection imparted by a phone or a camera. This has led to the unfortunate deaths of Syrian video activists and amateurs who have taken great personal risks to document the Syrian war, such as the death of Molhem Barakat, an eighteen-year-old activist in Aleppo who was killed while covering a battle between the Syrian army and the rebels for Reuters news agency.40 Within the Syrian context, the video camera has not given protection or led to accountability of perpetrators (yet), despite the somewhat utopian belief in the power of the camera as a weapon against oppression and authority, as propagated in Western discourse on the importance of digital media. Ghazzi argues that the conceptualization of digital media practices through a modernist Western discourse fails to take into account the deadly challenges citizens face within the context of the Syrian uprising.41 Another aspect is a false sense of the value, credibility and leverage that UGC from Syria has with Western media and legal institutions. Indeed, Syrian video activists, while they are convinced of the credibility of the footage, have encountered resistance with international human rights organizations in taking their video footage seriously. They became utterly disappointed over the years and expressed a lack of trust in the international community.



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I think the videos going out from Aleppo are all credible. But human rights organizations are closing their ears and eyes. They do not want to see the reality that is happening in Aleppo . . . They do not want to believe, they want to contradict the video. We give them a video, they try to falsify it. Although the video is so real but they do not want to think or believe the reality that there is a criminal in this world whose criminality has reached to an extent of killing for example in a short time more than 50,000 citizens and displacing over 1.5 million from Aleppo city. They do not want to know the truth. If they believed this truth and acknowledged it, Bashar al-Assad would have been ousted. They are not ready to oust Bashar al-Assad because they have interests with him. (Video activist from Aleppo, August 2014)42 The problem is that the video clips are used by all the organizations. Videos are the most used thing now and I mean the human [rights] organizations use this regularly. The basic tools are the videos taken by us, the media activists. But the problem is that the international community does not have a serious desire to hold the criminals accountable. They are not serious in [working] to hold the criminals accountable . . . they have enough evidence, whether with videos or other than videos, but they do not have the will, they are not serious to hold the regime accountable as a criminal or [anyone] other than it [the regime]. (Video activist from A’zaz, September 2014)43

The expression of disappointment and mistrust indicates that politics and strategic interests in Syria tend to override the political will and intention for TJ. Indeed, the Syrian regime has done its utmost to repudiate and counter any UGC video footage that is uploaded, by blatantly denying war crimes, stating that the activist videos were faked, that the recorded abuses never took place, barrel bombs and chemicals were not used or, in some cases, the collective punishments were justified in Assad’s war on terror. These politics of repudiation have been constantly devised by the Assad regime since the beginning of the Syrian crisis. Making use of social media, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, the pro-Assad digital communications campaign works around the clock in teams to insert counter-narratives ignoring, denying war crimes and repudiating grass-roots videos coming from besieged and bombarded rebelheld areas in Syria.44 Prati found that Assad has built an online campaign that is highly communicative and already began in 2006 when Asma’a al-Assad began negotiations with high-profile Western PR companies to portray the ruling family as democratic, symbolic for an open, modern and Westernized secular Syria resulting in a Syrian government contract with Brown Lloyd James Worldwide Ltd in 2010–11.45 The objectives of these campaigns to portray

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Assad as secular, socialist, democratic, kind, loving, strong, open, modern, supported by his people, can also be observed from interviews for international media networks by the regime’s spokeswoman, Buthaina Shaba’an and the Syrian president himself. The regime narratives also make use of Islamophobic sentiments in Western politics and audiences by designating its campaign of violence and oppression against the opposition as a ‘legitimate war against Islamic terror’, ignoring the existence of a secular opposition and characterizing all members of the opposition as ‘terrorists’. In an attempt to counter the many challenges of sourcing and verification of video material as legal evidence, several human rights organizations have started to develop specific methods of verification. To help journalists, activists and researchers verify YouTube videos, Amnesty International launched a website called the citizen evidence lab. The citizen evidence lab contains all kinds of tools such as the YouTube Data viewer, which allows researchers and activists to extract data from a video clip such as the exact timing of upload, location and whether other copies of the same clips exist on YouTube. Another useful tool for journalists and activists is the verification handbook for digital content produced by the European Journalism Centre (EJC) in order to sort out authentic material from fakes. The introduction of smartphones in combination with social networks was a game changer for research and human rights advocacy. Koettl and Matheson both argue that open-source UGC can be instrumental in evidencing human rights abuse on the condition that proper fact-finding methodologies are applied.46 In his latest article for the Centre of Governance and Human Rights at the University of Cambridge, Koettl states that the shift to digital technology to store and distribute information and the rise of digital images and videos from unofficial observers such as bystanders, video activists, armed actors, shared through social media provide immense opportunities and, at the same time, challenges for human rights practitioners.47 Verified video footage indeed helps in establishing that a crime has happened, but corroborated evidence is needed to legally establish who was responsible for the specific crime in the footage, where the act took place and who is the victim or group of victims. Preserving and archiving all footage from Syria is of crucial importance for TJ and several human rights organizations; Syrian lawyers and activists are currently compiling numerous files of possible evidence. One Syrian-led initiative, the ‘Syrian Archive’ provides an online violation database of systematically archived and verified YouTube clips. However, Syrian activists with smartphones pushing for accountability in TJ may still have a long road to getting the perpetrators prosecuted and convicted.48 Citizen video is increasingly



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used as evidence of serious crimes, yet there is no standard protocol for authenticating, and the use of video for war-crimes tribunals has until now been very limited. Witness, a New York-based human rights organization, developed a first field guide for the use of video to record human rights violations in 2016, and within journalism, Silverman’s Verification Handbook for Digital Content has been used to verify amateur videos.49 The handbook provides a step-by-step guide for how to deal with UGC during emergencies; verification of these kind of video clips consists of a mix of three main factors: a person’s resourcefulness and sources’ knowledge, documentation and the number of sources willing to talk about the recorded event. It seems YouTube is a notoriously weak platform for archiving of video recordings of war crimes due to the fact that many digital videos lose their geotagged metadata in the uploading process. Only a small number of YouTube videos can in fact be used for crime-based evidence in a process of TJ. Moreover, in cases of extreme violence, the lifespan of videos is not long as the video clips violate YouTube’s Community Guidelines on violent and graphic content. The most useful video data for legal evidence are thus not stored on YouTube but on the many servers, computers, hard disks and USB sticks that are in the hands of video activists themselves. This is the most valuable data for TJ. Other useful videos are self-incriminating video evidence, such as the so-called ‘trophy videos’ stored on mobile phones of the perpetrators, whereby the actual perpetrator’s identity is clearly recognizable when carrying out the war crime and if the clip can be corroborated on other social media platforms, such as Instagram and Facebook profile pictures and uploads, this can form crucial evidence for tribunals and court cases. In that way, TJ makes use of the narcissism of an abuser. In two separate cases in Sweden, Syrian men have been arrested for war crimes on the basis of uploaded online videos, photographs and other information on social media as were two Swedish nationals who were sentenced to life in prison after a video appeared online showing them taking part in the killing of two men in Aleppo. Considering its weakness of verifiability, corroborative measures should be taken for the legal use of digital video, and scholars are correct to be wary of using YouTube videos as their sole unit of analysis and data source for research on Syria. Using YouTube videos for research should always be done in combination with other data sources. Besides the difficulties of the legal verifiability of the videos, the uploaded UGC is still of immense value to give insight into the Syrian war and forms a vehicle for video activists to express their own moral outrage of the events happening in front of their eyes. They expressed a desire

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to gain attention from an outside audience in ‘peaceland’ in the hope that some key decision-makers and the public will take political and diplomatic action to stop the violence that they are suffering. There is a clear power asymmetry between those suffering the daily mass violence on the ground in Syria and the YouTube audiences in the West. Chouliaraki states that the division between safety and suffering captures a fundamental aspect of this asymmetry in the viewing relationships of television. This is the asymmetry of power between the comfort of spectators in their living rooms and the vulnerability of sufferers on the spectators’ television screens. The viewing asymmetry of television does not explicitly thematize the economic and political divisions of our world but reflects and consolidates them. Who watches and who suffers reflects the manner in which differences in economic resources, political stability, governmental regimes and everyday life enter the global landscape of information. Similarly, who acts on whose suffering reflects patterns of economic and political agency across global zones of influence  – North and South or East and West (Chouliaraki, 2008)50

All the video activists interviewed expressed deep disillusionment with the apathy of Western audiences and silence of Western politicians. We care more for people in our immediate surroundings than those whose rights are violated in faraway places, in other cultures with whom we cannot identify. Video activists became aware of this kind of selective empathy by Western audiences, hence the remark by a Syrian FSA fighter in Nour Kelze’s film Not Anymore: The Story of a Revolution (2013) where he points at a cat: Film the animals, maybe this cat is more important to the Americans, more than the Syrian people, because I am sure the animals have rights in America more than the people here. They don’t care about us. So maybe when you are filming three or four cats, and put it on YouTube, maybe one million will watch the video, will see the video in one hour. They don’t care about the people. Maybe after the Americans see that, and find there is a cat here in Syria, I hope they will help the cat! . . . Maybe they will help Syria then.51

Epilogue

This book is testimony to the incredible and unprecedented courage of Syrian documentary film-makers and video activists, which has hopefully not been in vain. Watching the hours of Syrian documentary films for this book and meeting the many inspiring film-makers and cinematographers, what emerged as one important theme throughout is the notion of ‘imprisonment’, not only in many of the film stories itself but also in the personal accounts of the filmmakers, young and old. Most of those I interviewed have in some way or another experienced arrests, torture or imprisonment. Their freedom severely restricted, imprisonment entails more than just the experience of actual incarceration. It determines how Syrians experience the world. I had a memorable meeting in Stockholm in September 2017, where Cecile Boëx, Ali al-Atassi and myself had been invited for a workshop on video activism and dissidence at the Swedish Film Institute organized by Stockholm University. Ali and I had arranged to meet Omar al-Shogre, a 21-year-old Syrian who had fled to Sweden after he survived three years of incarceration in the notorious torture prison of Saydnaya.1 For hours, Ali and I listened intently to the stories told by Omar. His animated talk and re-enactments of the torture he had undergone and impressions of the torturers and guards made a deep impression on us. This was a young man, full of life, who had seen his life destroyed at the age of seventeen. Yet his zest for life was infectious and admirable, although at the same time, I felt a profound grief. Saydnaya prison was pure hell. It was a miracle that Omar had survived. He felt it as his obligation to tell his story to everyone, he said, because he survived. Those who survive Assad’s prisons indeed seem to become more encouraged to tell their stories. An auteur film provides this same kind of voice and these young people found their voice, despite the desperate attempts of the regime to imprison and curtail them; their voices only became stronger with the years.

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In this book, I  have shown how rich Syria’s documentary film heritage is, emerging since the 1970s. Documenting the Syrian Revolution with a camera was a no-brainer for those who worked as film-makers prior to 2011. The arrival of Syrian-made documentary films on the world markets and festivals, and the enormous number of YouTube videos from Syria since the outbreak of the uprisings, have constituted a revolution in themselves. The inspired creative resistance transformed the way in which contemporary wars are observed and documented. Suddenly, war became an immersive experience. YouTube served long as the primary platform for user-generated content (UGC), but as shown by many clips that have been taken down since 2018, it is not a stable platform to deposit evidence. However, as a platform of space to express moral outrage, YouTube is of great value for digital memorialization and historicization of the Syrian Revolution. The Syrian Revolution has not led to the downfall of authoritarianism; at the moment the Assad regime has regained much of its territory and reinstalled the state. Millions of the population have been forcibly evacuated from their homes in eastern Aleppo and Ghouta to the northern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo countryside. Afrin has been taken over by the Turkish army. Most civil society and young pro-democracy activists have left the country and are continuing their activism in the Syrian diaspora; for them the revolution still exists and continues.2 Those, mainly leftist, young activists who stayed behind have very little agency, are incarcerated or have been killed under torture.3 There is a darker side to the Syrian audiovisual archive, the risk of not being forgotten but of a political economy behind the images of the Syrian Revolution that has led rather to an industry of death than to a revolution to establish democracy. As Ammar Beik explained to me, After 2011, and with the presence of mobile phones, people became able to express their anger through photography and filming. There are hundreds of thousands of hours of rushes all over the internet; many films were made under different names between documentaries and reportage, however, the artistically high-level films are still rare. The existence of a film about the Syrian Revolution does not necessarily mean that it is an important film. It is unfortunate that the West pays to help the film industry to see images of destruction and death in Syria through so-called film-makers, it’s a death trade.4

It is not easy to stay positive about Syria’s future in 2019. The country has changed and is unrecognizable to what it was before. The slogan ‘Assad or we will burn the country’ has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the other hand,

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the Syrian Revolution came out of the bottle and it is impossible to put it back in. The stage is set for a long protraction of conflict in Syria. Ali al-Atassi told me, I don’t know or see a future right now. Assad belongs to the past. It will never work with him again. We will not go back. Those who have tasted freedom will not go back under repression. But he has no interest to settle the problem. He knows the degree of hatred, and he knows that if he gives the public space it will be his end. The only way for him was to push the other side to violence. He survives but he destroyed the country and society. I think really this man is worse than his father and his brother. He has no self-confidence. This was a problem between him and his father. He was always second-best. He wants to prove himself. His son Hafez is already being pushed.5

What does this mean for the future of Syrian documentary film? Syrian films have been put on the map of the major festivals, accumulated the first Oscar nomination in Syrian film history in 2018. Is this the moment in time when Syrian documentary cinema will develop and consolidate in exile? Sipping tea with me in a quiet urban neighbourhood, my old friend Joude contemplates, Currently, there is a real boom in Syrian documentary production. The question is, if this is going to create a real movement? Some people started as activists and got interested in a more artistic pursuit. Definitely the film landscape is changed a lot. But the problem also is that young film-makers are getting a lot of attention because of the situation. They don’t feel they are established and they don’t think they have to develop or not. I think the real challenge is to make films that are not about the current situation. It makes it easier to have incredible footage because of the powerfulness. Just the fact that the filmmaker was there and came back. That is why it is important to really develop film documentary workshops for them to keep learning and evolving. We are now doing online training courses to teach them at a distance.6

What strikes me time and again in international academic panels, negotiations about the future of Syria, donor conferences of development assistance and other international events concerning Syria or Syrian refugees, is that there is a lack of the voice of actual Syrians. We do not have to look far to find their voices. With the exodus and diaspora of Syrians, Syria is now in the world. It is important to remember that the incredible and unique legacy of cinema, documentary film and video activism that emerged from Syria since the 1970s provides an indispensable and valuable archive of documentation of the country’s history and politics and most importantly of the voices of Syrians. It is in the hope that in the future, this legacy will help one day in bringing justice to the Syrians.

Filmography Name of film-makers

Year of birth

Film (year of production)

Ismael Anzour

1905

Tahta Sama’ Dimashq/Under the Damascus Sky (1932) (silent movie)

Nazih al-Shahbandar (d. 1996)

1910

Nour wa Thilal/Light and Darkness (1947) (first talkie)

Nabil Maleh (d. 2016)

1936

Aleppo (1965) Colour and Life (1965) Documentaries Jeddah (1966) Mecca (1967) The Game of Eternity (1971) The Rocks (1977) The School (1978) The Circle (1978) A Bedouin Day (1981) The Extras (1993) drama Bedouin World (1994) The Murder Club (2002) The Bright Darkness (2002) A Murder Case (2003) Al Baroudi (2004) Family – Children (2006) The Road to Damascus (2006) Contrejour (2007) Beyond Bars (2007) The Doll in Her Hands (2007) Heaven before Her Time (2007) Tomorrow’s Memories (2007) Damascus, the Family (2007) A Bedouin Potrait (2007) Portrait from Kamishli (2007) From 8 to 10 (2007) Damascene Bouquet (2008) Damascene Secrets (2008) The Holy Crystal (2008) Water (2010) United in Exile (2011)

Youssef Fahdah

1940

The Beginnings of Syria in Cinema (1964)

Filmography

256 Name of film-makers

Year of birth

Film (year of production)

Omar Amiralay (d. 2011)

1944

Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam (1970) Everyday Life in a Syrian Village (1974) Chickens (1977) On a Revolution (1978) The Misfortunes of Some . . .  (1981) A Scent of Paradise (1982) Love Aborted (1983) Video on Sand (1984) The Intimate Enemy (1986) The Lady of Shibam (1988) East of Eden (1988) For the Attention of Madame the Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto (1990) Light and Shadows, the Last of the Pioneers: Nazih Shahbandar (1994) The Master (1995) On a Day of Ordinary Violence, My Friend Michel Seurat . . .  (1996) Moudaress (1996) There Are So Many Things Still to Say (1997) A Plate of Sardines (1997) The Man with the Golden Soles (1999) A Flood in Baath Country (2003)

Mohammed Malas

1945

A Dream of a Small City (1970) Quneitra 74 (1974) The Memory (1977) Dreams of the City (1984) Dream (1987) Chiaroscuro (1990) The Night (1992) Light and Shadows, the Last of the Pioneers: Nazih Shahbandar (1994) Moudaress (1996) A Plate of Sardines (1997) Aleppo, Maqams for Pleasure (1998) Passion (2005) Ladder to Damascus (2013) (drama)

Hanna Ward (cinematographer/DOP)

1945

Step by Step (1978 For the Attention of Madame the Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto (1990) Land for a Stranger (1998) (docudrama) A Little Sun (2007) (drama)

Samir Zikra

1945

We Will Not Forget (1974) The Witnesses (1974) The Sea, our Western Front (1975)

Filmography Name of film-makers

Year of birth

Film (year of production) About Her (1982) Land for a Stranger (1998) (docudrama)

Kais al-Zubaidi (editor)

1945

Far from the Homeland (1969) The Visit (1970) Testimony of Palestinian Children in Wartime (1972) With Soul, With Blood (1971) Homeland of Barbed Wire (1980)

Mohammed Al Roumi

1945

Bleu Gris (2004)

Raymond Boutros

1946

Ordinary Zionism (1974) The Witness (1986) Features of Damascus (2008)

Walid al-Kowatli

1946

Syrian Children Rise to Heavens (2014)

Haytham Hakki

1948

The Play (1979)

Abdellatif Abdelhamid

1954

Our Hands (Aydina)(1982) Wishes (Umniyat) (1983)

Ossama Mohammed

1954

Step by Step (1978) Today and Everyday (1981) Light and Shadows, the Last of the Pioneers: Nazih Shahbandar (1994) Moudaress (1996) Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait (2014) (with Wiam Simav Bedirxan)

Hala Al-Abdallah Yaqoub

1956

I Am the One Who brings Flowers to Her Grave (2006) (with Ammar al-Beik) Yolla, Un retour vers soi (2008) Hey, Don’t Forget the Cumin (2008) As If We Were Catching a Cobra (2012/120 mins) Venice 70: Future Reloaded (2013) Farouk, Besieged Like Me (2017)

Hala Mohammed

1956

Divorce and Marriage (2005) For a Little Piece of Cake (2005) Journey into Memory (2006) When Qasiyun Grows Tired (2006)

Nidal al Dibs

1960

Black Stone (2006)

Mohammed Ali al-Atassi

1967

Ibn al Am (2001) Waiting for Abu Zaid (2010) Ibn Al Amn on-line (2012) Our Terrible Country (2014)

Maya al-Khoury (Abounaddara)

1969

Of God and Dogs (2014) (short film) Fragments of the Revolution (2015) On Revolution (2017)

257

Filmography

258 Name of film-makers

Year of birth

Film (year of production)

Ammar al Beik

1972

Light Harvest (1996) (short) They Were Here (2000) The River of Gold (2002) (16mm) Boulevard Al Assad (2002) My Ear Can See (2002) When I Color My Fish (2002) Clapper Father Paolo Dall’oglio: The ‘Icon’ of the Syrian Revolution (2003) I Am the One Who Brings Flowers to Her Own Grave (with Hala al-Abdallah) (2007) Samia (2008) Alabdalla (2008) Aspirin and a Bullet (2011) The Sun’s Incubator (2011) La Dolce Siria (2014) Kaleidoscope (2015)

Meyar al-Roumi

1973

A Silent Cinema (2001) Waiting for the Day (2004) The Club of the Future (2006) Six Ordinary Stories (2007)

Nidal Hassan (Berlinale Talents 2015)

1974

Salty Skin (2003)(drama) Flint Mountains (2009/46 mins) True Stories of Love, Life, Death and Sometimes Revolution (2012/62 mins) By the Sea (2018/110 mins) Near to Kobani (2018/7 mins)

Alfoz Tanjour

1975

A Little Sun (2007) (drama) Damascus Symphony of a City (2009) Cola Bridge (2009) Wooden Rifle (2013) Beyond the City’s Walls (2014) Syria: The Battle Beyond (2014) Faraway So Close from Borderline (2014) Death of Aleppo (2016) A Memory in Khaki (2016)

Diana el Jeiroudi

1977

The Pot (2005) Dolls: A Woman from Damascus (2007) Morning fears, Night Chants (2012) (as Salma Aldairy) Republic of Silence (2018)

Talal Derki

1977

Hero of the Sea (2010) Azadi (2011) Lajat (2012)

Filmography Name of film-makers

Year of birth

259

Film (year of production) Return to Homs (2013) Odes to Lesvos (2016) Of Father & Sons (2017) The Waste Land (2018)

Rafaat Al Zakout

1977

Home (2015)

Reem Ali

1977

Foam (Zabad) (2006)

Liwaa Yazji

1977

Windows of the Soul (2011) (docudrama) Haunted (2014)

Naji Jerf (d. 2015)

1977

Da’esh in Aleppo (2015)

Reem Ghazi

1977

Abortion of the Soul (2013) (producer)

Abdallah Hakawati (cinematographer/DOP)

1978

False Alarm (2014)

Ammar Alani and Allyth Hajjo

1978

Windows of the Soul (2011) (docudrama)

Obaidah Zytoon

1979

The War Show (2016)

Soudade Kaadan

1979

Two Cities and a Prison (2008) Looking for Pink (2009) While My Soul Is Unmindful (2009) Damascus Roofs Tales of Paradise (2010) Obscure (2017)

Omar Imam

1979

Syrialism (2017)

Joude Gorani (cinematographer/DOP)

1980

Before Vanishing (2005) (director) Black Stone (2006) Dolls: a Woman from Damascus (2007) Ibn al Am On-line (2012) Ladder to Damascus (2013) (drama) Haunted (2014) Home (2015)

Rami Farrah

1980

Point (2004) (drama) Silence (2006) On Screen On Record   (working title, in production) A Comedian in a Syrian Tragedy   (working title, in production)

Hazem al-Hamwi

1980

The Right Side of the Road (2004) Stone Bird (2006) Moaning (2011) From My Syrian Room (2014)

Lina al-Abed

1980

Nour al Houda (2010) Damascus, My First Kiss (2013) A Dream of Powerful Monsters (2014)

Filmography

260 Name of film-makers

Year of birth

Film (year of production) Ibrahim (2015) A Home on a Rainbow, about the Ongoing Syrian Exodus (2015)

Nisrine Boukhari

1980

Spring (2008)

Hisham al Zouki

1980

Nostalgia (1998) Eternally Aliens (2002) Just a City (2003) Songs from a Secret Floor (2006) Untold Stories (2013)

Ziad Kalthoum

1981

Oh My Heart (2009) The Immortal Sergeant (2014) Taste of Cement (2017)

Abo Gabi

1982

Blue (2014) (short)

Rami Nihawi

1982

Revenging for the Astronaut (2007)   Yamo (2011) A Home on a Rainbow, about the Ongoing Syrian Exodus (2015)

Sara Fatahi (Berlinale Talents 2017)

1983

27meters (2013) Coma (2015) Chaos (working title, in production)

Nadim Deaibes

1983

A home on a Rainbow, about the Ongoing Syrian Exodus (2015)

Guevara Namer

1984

Morning Fears, Night Chants (2013)   (as Roula Ladqani)

Firas Fayyad (Oscar nominee 2018)

1984

On the Other Side (2011) Behind the White Colour (2015) Last Men in Aleppo (2017)

Bassel Shehadeh (d. 2012)

1984

I Dream of My Home (2009) (short) Carrying Eid to Camps (2010) (short) Reading Workshop (2010) (short) Saturday Morning Gift (2010) (short) A Memory of Forgetfullness (2011) (short) Merry Christmas Homs (2012) (short) I Will Cross Tomorrow (2012) (short) Singing to Freedom (2012) Streets of Freedom (2013) #chicagoGirl: The Social Network Takes on a Dictator (2013) (cinematography)

Layla Abyad

1984

The Syrian War Zone Kids That Have Lost Their Innocence (2012) Playground from Hell (2013) Letters to S. (2015) (short) 5 Seasons of Revolution (2018) (working title, in production)

Filmography

261

Name of film-makers

Year of birth

Film (year of production)

Mezar Matar (cinematographer/DOP)

1984

False Alarm (2014)

Mohammed Dibo

1984

The Most Pretty Dudes (2016)

Ziad al-Homsi

1985

Our Terrible Country (2014)

Orwa al-Mokdad

1985

Street Music (2013) Being Good So Far part 1 & part 2 (2014) Under the Tank (2014) 300 Miles (2016)

Kareem Abeed (producer) (Oscar nominee 2018)

1985

Last Men in Aleppo (2017)

Zaina Erhaim

1985

Syria’s Rebellious Women (2015)

Wael Hamada

1985

The Sea Belongs to Mariam   (working title, in production)

Amer Matar

1986

Azadi (2011) Smuggling 23 Minutes of Revolution (2011) False Alarm (2014)

Amr Khito

1986

The War Show (2016) (camera) The Most Pretty Dudes (2016) (producer) Home (2015) Paradise Radio (working title, in production) No Jihad in Here (working title, in production)

Bahraa Hijazi

1986

Abortion of the Soul (2013)

Afraa Batous

1986

Skin (2016)

Madonna Adib

1986

Demain L’adieu (2012) Syrian Eyes of the World (2018)

Avo Kaprealian

1987

Houses without Doors (2016)

Ali Sheikh Khudr

1987

City of Emptiness (2008) Cow Farm (2016)

Ossama al-Habaly (d. 2017)

1988

The Child Who Doesn’t Cry (Abou Naddara) My School (Abou Naddara) Return to Homs (2013)

Hussam Eesa (cinematographer)

1988

City of Ghosts (2017)

Ali al-Ibrahim (Oscar nominee)

1988

One Day in Aleppo (2017) Last Men in Aleppo (2017)

Yasser Kassab

1988

On the Edge of Life (2017)

Filmography

262 Name of film-makers

Year of birth

Film (year of production)

Saeed al-Batal

1988

Frontline (2015) To Be Continued (2016) Still Recording (2018)

Yousef Aljnde

1988

Captain Diaa (2017)

Salah Ashkar

1988

Citizen Journalist (2016)

Sam Kadi (Oscar nominee)

1988

Little Gandhi (2016)

Samer Salameh

1989

194. Us, Children of the Camp (2017)

Azza Hamwi

1989

Homs, I Will Stay (2012) A Farewell to Damascus (2013) Art of Surviving (2013) A Day and a Button (2015)

Ghiath Haddad

1989

Frontline (2015) Still Recording (2018)

Saleh Jamal Eddin

1992

Illegal Dream (2017)

Reem Karssli

?

Every Day, Every Day (2013)

Wiam Simav Bedirxan (cinematographer/DOP/ Director)

?

Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait (2014) (with Ossama Mohammed)

Firas Zbib (Lebanese)

?

False Alarm (2014)

Ismael Matter

?

Love during Siege, Diaries of a Family in the Besieged Southern Damascus (2015)

Dana Araby

?

Why Do We Film Ourselves Now? (2015)

Laura Wadha (BAFTA New Talent Award)

?

Flight (2017)

A call from Syrian film-makers Posted on Facebook on 29 April 2011. Peaceful Syrian citizens are being killed today for their demands of basic rights and liberties. It is the same oppression and corruption that kept Syrians prisoners and swallowed their freedom, properties and lives for decades, that is assassinating their bodies and dreams today. We, the undersigned Syrian film-makers, believe that a reform which does not start with putting an end to security forces’ control over our people’s lives and bodies, and with closing an era of shameful political imprisonment for good, is not enough. Hereby, we call on all film-makers in the world to contribute to stopping the killing by exposing and denouncing it, and by announcing their solidarity with the Syrian people and with their dreams of justice, equality and freedom. Undersigned by over a thousand film-makers from Syria and worldwide.

Notes Preface 1 Maxine Baker, Documentary in the Digital Age (London: Taylor & Francis, 2006). 2 The systems of ‘Qanat Romani’, as they are called in Syria, consist of underground water tunnels that tap water and bring it to the surface using gravity. The qanats of Syria are most probably from late Roman and early Byzantine origin. The technology itself is said to be more than 2,500 years old and most probably was discovered in the north of Ancient Persia, at the time of the Urartu Kingdom around the tenth century bc. Between 1999 and 2004, I coordinated, evaluated and carried out three qanat rehabilitations in Syria – in Shallalah Saghirah, Qara and Dmeir. In 2001, I carried out a national survey of qanats in Syria, documenting the remaining flowing tunnels still in use. Eventually, this elaborate data collection formed the basis of my PhD thesis and its accompanying films in 2008. 3 Joseph Fahim, ‘Are Arab Documentaries Entering a Golden Age?’, Middle East Eye (13 April 2018). 4 Rasha Salti, ‘The Paradoxes of Syrian Cinema’, Kosmorama 237 (2006). 5 Salti, ‘The Paradoxes of Syrian Cinema’, 2006. 6 Ibid. 7 Mădălina Roșca, Seeing with Feeling: Filmed Revolutions of Others, from an Empathic towards an Involved Spectatorship of Documentaries, PhD Thesis, Ludwig Maximillians Universität, München: Faculty of History and the Arts (Germany, 2016); Joseph Gugler (ed.), Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011); Miriam Cooke, Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 8 Christa Salamandra, ‘Television and the Ethnographic Endeavour, the Case of Syrian Drama’ in W. Ambrust (ed.), Transnational Broadcasting Studies, Culture Wars, the Arab Music Video Controversy (New York: The American University of Cairo Press, 2005). 9 Rasha Salti, Insights into Syrian Cinema: Essays and Conversations with Contemporary Filmmakers (New York: ArteEast, 2006). 10 Stefanie van de Peer, Negotiating Dissidence; The Pioneering Women of Arab Documentary (London: Edinburgh University Press, 2017). 11 Charlotte Bank, The Contemporary Art Scene in Syria 2000–2010: Between the Legacy of Social Critique and a Contemporary Artistic Movement in the Arab World, PhD Thesis (University of Geneve, 2017).

266

Notes

12 Kay Dickinson, Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond (New York: British Film Institute, 2016). 13 Lina Khatib, Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006). 14 Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, 2015). 15 Cecile Boëx, ‘The End of the State Monopoly over Culture: Toward the Commodification of Cultural and Artistic Production’, Middle East Critique 20/2 (2011), pp. 139–55. 16 Cecile Boëx, ‘Emergency Cinema; An Interview with Syrian Collective Abounaddara’ (2012) [Books & Ideas.Net.] 17 Donatella Della Ratta, Dramas of the Authoritarian State: The Politics of Syrian TV Serials in the Pan Arab Market, PhD Thesis, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen (Copenhagen, 2013). 18 Donatella Della Ratta, Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria (Chicago: Pluto Press, 2018).

Introduction 1 Malu Halasa and Rana Salam, Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2008). 2 Mark Lynch, Dean Freelon and Sean Aday, Syria’s Socially Mediated Civil War, United States Institute of Peace (USIP) Report (Washington, 2014); Ugur Ümit Üngör, ‘Mass Violence in Syria: A Preliminary Analysis’, New Middle Eastern Studies 3 (2013), pp. 1–22.

Dissident art and Arab cinema 1 Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema, History and Cultural Identity (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000). 2 Lina Khatib and Ellen Lust (eds), Taking to the Streets: The Transformation of Arab Activism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Lina Khatib, Image Politics in the Middle East: The Role of the Visual in Political Struggle (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012). 3 Lina Khatib, Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006). 4 Miriam Cooke, Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

Notes

267

Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination, 1999. p. 67 Lina Khatib, Image Politics in the Middle East, 2012. Rasha Salti, ‘The Paradoxes of Syrian Cinema’, Kosmorama, 237 (2006). Rasha Salti, Insights into Syrian Cinema: Essays and Conversations with Contemporary Filmmakers (New York: ArteEast, 2006). 9 Ibid. 10 Hugh Miles, Al Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenged the World (London: Grove Press, 2005); Khalil Rinnawi, Instant Nationalism: McArabism, Al-Jazeera, and Transnational Media in the Arab World (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2006). 11 Rebecca Hillauer (ed.), Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005); Stefanie van de Peer, Negotiating Dissidence, 2017. 12 Joseph Fahim, ‘Are Arab Documentaries Entering a Golden Age?’, Middle East Eye (13 April, 2018). 13 Gönül Dönmez-Colin (ed.), The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East (London: Wallflower Press, 2007). 14 Roy Armes, Arab Filmmakers of the Middle East: A Dictionary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). 15 Roy Armes, Roots of the New Arab Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018). 16 Joseph Gugler (ed.), Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). 17 Josef Gugler (ed.), Ten Arab Filmmakers: Political Dissent and Social Critique (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). 18 Christa Salamandra, ‘Nabil Maleh: Syria’s Leopard’ in Josef Gugler (ed.), Ten Arab Filmmakers: Political Dissent and Social Critique (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). 19 Christa Salamandra, ‘Television and the Ethnographic Endeavour: The Case of Syrian Drama’, 2005; Christa Salamandra, ‘Spotlight on the Bashār al-Asad Era: The Television Drama Outpouring’, Middle East Critique, 20/2 (2011), pp. 157–67; Christa Salamandra, ‘Syrian Television Drama, a National Industry in a Pan-Arab Mediascape’ in Tourya Guaaybess (ed.), National Broadcasting and State Policy in Arab Countries (New York: Palgrave, 2013). 20 Omar Al-Ghazzi, ‘Nation as Neighborhood: How Bab al-Hara Dramatized Syrian Identity’, Media, Culture and Society 35/5 (2013), pp. 586–601. 21 Nabish Bulos, ‘Small Screen: Syria Confronts Its Civil War in New TV Dramas’, Los Angeles Times (6 March 2018). 22 Roșca, Seeing with Feeling, p. 404. 23 Ibid., p. 407. 24 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003); Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1973). 5 6 7 8

268

Notes

25 Josepha Wessels, ‘The Role of Grassroots Videos in Conflict Escalation’, in Ole Waever and Isabel Bramsen (eds), New Theories and Approaches in Peace & Conflict, Centre for Resolution of International Conflicts (CRIC), Copenhagen (London: Routledge, 2018). (Forthcoming, reviewed, in press); Josepha Wessels, ‘Video Activists from Aleppo and Raqqa as “Modern-Day Kinoks”’, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 10 (2017) pp. 159–74. 26 Josepha Wessels, ‘YouTube and Evidencing Warcrimes: The Role of Digital Video for Transitional Justice in Syria’, Politik 4/19 (2016), pp. 30–52. 27 Farida Vis and Olga Goriunova (eds), The Iconic Image on Social Media: A Rapid Research Response to the Death of Aylan Kurdi (Sheffield: Visual Social Media Lab, 2015). 28 Ray Drainville, ‘On the Iconology of Aylan Kurdi, Alone’, in Farida Vis and Olga Goriunova (eds), The Iconic Image on Social Media: A Rapid Research Response to the Death of Aylan Kurdi (Sheffield: Visual Social Media Lab, 2015). 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., p. 59. 31 Tina Kurdi, The Boy on the Beach My Family’s Escape from Syria and Our Hope for a New Home (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018). 32 Marwan Kraidy, ‘The Body as Medium in the Digital Age: Challenges and Opportunities’, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 10/2–3 (2013), pp. 285–90. 33 Omar Al-Ghazzi, ‘“Citizen Journalism” in the Syrian Uprising: Problematizing Western Narratives in a Local Context’, Communication Theory 24/4 (2014), pp. 435–54. 34 Cecile Boëx, ‘Emergency Cinema: An Interview with Syrian Collective Abounaddara’ (2012), [Books & Ideas.Net.]; Cecile Boëx, ‘The End of the State Monopoly over Culture: Toward the Commodification of Cultural and Artistic Production’, Middle East Critique 20/2 (2011), pp. 139–55. 35 Kay Dickinson, ‘The State of Labor and Labor for the State: Syrian and Egyptian Cinema beyond the 2011 Uprisings’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 53/1 (2012), pp. 99–116; Kay Dickinson, ‘Syrian Cinema, Out of Time?’, Screening the past Issue 34 (2012). 36 Kay Dickinson, Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond (London: British Film Institute, 2016). 37 Stefanie van de Peer, Negotiating Dissidence, 2017. 38 Charlotte Bank, ‘Veiled Visuality: Video Art in Syria’, Arts & Culture ISIM Review autumn/22 (2008). 39 Charlotte Bank, ‘On the Need to Act Quickly’, Springerin 3/12 (2012). 40 Charlotte Bank, The Contemporary Art Scene in Syria 2000–2010: Between the Legacy of Social Critique and a Contemporary Artistic Movement in the Arab World, PhD Thesis (University of Geneve, 2017).

Notes

269

41 Elias, Chad and Zaher Omareen, ‘Syria’s Imperfect Cinema’, in Malu Halasa, Zaher Omareen and Nawara Mahfoud (eds), Syria Speaks Art and Culture from the Frontline (London: Saqi Books, 2014).

Part 1  Documentary film-making in Syria 1 Christa Salamandra, ‘Nabil Maleh: Syria’s Leopard’, in Josef Gugler (ed.), Ten Arab Filmmakers: Political Dissent and Social Critique (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). 2 Miriam Cooke, Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 3 Rasha Salti, ‘The Paradoxes of Syrian Cinema’, Kosmorama 237 (2006). 4 Kiki, Kennedy-Day, ‘Cinema in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Kuwait’, in Oliver Leaman (ed.), Companion Encyclopedia of Middle Eastern and North African Film (New York: Routledge, 2001). 5 Terri Ginsberg and Chris Lippard, Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema (Plymouth: Scarecrow, 2010). 6 Stefanie van de Peer, ‘The Moderation of Creative Dissidence in Syria: Reem Ali’s Documentary Zabad’, in Anastasia Valassopoulos (ed.), Arab Cultural Studies: History, Politics and the Popular (London: Routledge, 2013). 7 Cecile Boëx, ‘Emergency Cinema; An Interview with Syrian Collective Abounaddara’ (2012), [Books & Ideas.Net.] Available at: http://www. booksandideas.net/Emergency- Cinema.html (accessed 2 March 2013). 8 Chad Elias Chad and Zaher Omareen, ‘Syria’s Imperfect Cinema’, in Malu Halasa, Zaher Omareen and Nawara Mahfoud (eds), Syria Speaks Art and Culture from the Frontline (London: Saqi Books, 2014). 9 Joshka Wessels, ‘Syria’s first Mobile Phone Films Festival celebrates new tool for civil resistance’, Your Middle East, December 9 (2014). Available online: http://www. yourmiddleeast.com/culture/syrias-first-mobile-phone-films-festival-celebratesnew-tool-for-civil-resistance-video_28449.

1  Masters of Syrian documentary 1 Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2000); Ginsberg and Lippard, Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema, pp. 381–2. 2 Ginsberg and Lippard, Historical Dictionary, p. 382; Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema, revised and updated edition, 2016, p. 154.

270

Notes

3 Yaqub, Nadia, Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018). 4 Annemarie Jacir, ‘Coming Home, Palestinian Cinema’ (2007) [Electronic Intifada.] Available at https://electronicintifada.net/content/coming-home-palestiniancinema/6780 (accessed 2 July 2017). 5 Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema, History and Cultural Identity, revised and updated edition (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2016). 6 Ibid., p. 155. 7 Lawrence Wright, ‘Captured on Film, Can Dissident Filmmakers Effect Change in Syria?’, The New Yorker (15 May 2006). 8 Kay Dickinson, ‘Syrian Cinema, Out of Time?’, Screening the Past Issue 34 (2012). Available at http://www.screeningthepast.com/2012/08/ syrian-cinema-out-of-time/#_edn4. 9 Wright, ‘Captured on Film’, 2006. 10 Rasha Salti, ‘Nadi al-Sinama in Damascus, or When Cinema Wielded Power to Threaten the Social Order’, Arte East Quarterly, Spring Issue (2008). Available at http://arteeast.org/quarterly/nadi-al-sinama-in-damascus-or-whencinemawielded-power-to-threaten-the-social-order/ (accessed 18 August 2017). 11 Ginsberg and Lippard, Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema, p. 383; Wright, ‘Captured on Film’, 2006. 12 Omar Amiralay, ‘Documentary, history and memory’, DI/VISIONS. Kultur und Politik im Nahen Osten, Stimmen, Gespräche, Projektionen, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2007). Available at https://www.hkw.de/de/app/mediathek/video/40294 (accessed 18 August 2017). 13 Rasha Salti, ‘Nadi al-Sinama in Damascus, or When Cinema Wielded Power to Threaten the Social Order’, 2008. 14 Ibid. 15 Rebecca Hillauer, Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005). 16 Salti, ‘Nadi al-Sinama in Damascus’, 2008. 17 Wright, ‘Captured on Film’, 2006. 18 Salti, ‘Nadi al-Sinama in Damascus’, 2008. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 van de Peer, ‘The Moderation of Creative Dissidence in Syria’, p. 192; Rasha Salti (ed.), Insights into Syrian Cinema: Essays and Conversations with Contemporary Filmmakers (New York: ArteEast, 2006). 22 Ginsberg and Lippard, Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema, p. 28. 23 Nadine el Ali, ‘A Tribute to Omar Amiralay’, NOW (8 February 2011). Available at https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/reportsfeatures/a_tribute_to_omar_amiralay_ (accessed 18 August 2017).

Notes

271

24 Reem Saleh, ‘This is Omar Amiralay’, Doha Film Institute Blog (26 February 2011). Available at http://www.dohafilminstitute.com/blog/this-is-omar-amiralay (accessed 18 August 2017). 25 I Am Film, ‘Omar Amiralay’ (2013) [YouTube]. Available at https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=8Gpl1hzhbk8 (accessed 3 January 2017). 26 Rasha Salti, ‘The Paradoxes of Syrian Cinema’, 2006; Ginsberg and Lippard, Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema, p. 28. 27 The Damascus Bureau, ‘Omar Amiralay; The Unfinished Documentary’ (2011) [YouTube]. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZEG6XojnnM (accessed 1 January 2017). 28 Ginsberg and Lippard, Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema, p. 28. 29 Yazan al-Hajj, ‘Understanding “Everday Life in a Syrian Village” Forty Years After Its Production’, Al Akhbar (11 February 2015). Available at http://english.al-akhbar. com/node/23727 (accessed 20 August 2017). 30 Ibid. 31 Amiralay, ‘Documentary, History and Memory’, 2007. 32 Samar Zahrawi, ‘Syrian Drama Escaping Censorship: Sa’adallah Wannous’s The King’s Elephant and The King is King’, Arab World English Journal (AWEJ) 6/2 (2015), pp. 329–36. 33 María Belén Garrido and Cécile Mouly, ‘Achievements and Challenges of the Nonviolent Movement in Syria’, Revista Sul-Americana de Ciência Política 1/2 (2013), pp. 38–50. 34 Sonja Mejcher-Atassi, ‘Library Brings Praise, Controversy’, The Daily Star (4 March 2017). 35 Chantal Berman, ‘Two Films for the Syrian Unraveling’, Jadaliyya (6 May 2011). 36 Saba Imtiaz ‘Rights Violations: Pakistan Maintains Discreet Silence Over Syria Protest’ The Express Tribune (9 August 2011). Available at https://tribune.com.pk/ story/227176/rights-violations-pakistan-maintains-discreet-silence-oversyria-protest/ 37 Laura U. Marks, Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). 38 Salti, ‘Paradoxes of Syrian Cinema’, p. 19. 39 Kay Dickinson, ‘The State of Labor and Labor for the State: Syrian and Egyptian Cinema beyond the 2011 Uprisings’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 53/1 (2012), pp. 99–116. 40 Mohammed Ali Atassi, ‘Thirteen Hours of Interrogation’, Al Jadid, 12/54/55 (2006). Available at http://www.aljadid.com/content/thirteen-hours-interrogation. 41 Ibid.; Ginsberg and Lippard, Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema, p. 29. 42 Salti, ‘The Paradoxes of Syrian Cinema’, pp. 1–22. 43 Willemien Sanders, ‘DOX BOX: Trying to Open Some Windows’, Real Screen (1 March 2008). Available at http://realscreen.com/2008/03/01/page10-20080301/.

272

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44 Miriam Cooke, Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 45 Ibid., p. 117. 46 Ibid., pp. 117–18. 47 Ibid., p. 118. 48 Sanders, ‘DOX BOX: Trying to Open Some Windows’. 49 Cooke, Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official, p. 115. 50 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nxxb_7wzvJI. 51 Shafik, Arab Cinema, p. 155. 52 Patrick Seale, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 53 Marks, Hanan al-Cinema, pp. 39–41. 54 Ibid., p. 39. 55 Salti, ‘Nadi al-Sinama in Damascus’, 2008. 56 Atassi, ‘Thirteen Hours of Interrogation’, 2006. 57 Ibid. 58 Eric Reidy, ‘Syria’s Democracy and Lebanon’s Independence’, SKeyes (25 May 2015). 59 Lisa Wedeen, ‘Ossama Mohammed: Resilience and Poetic Creativity against All Odds’, NAFAS Art Magazine (February 2016). Available at https://universes.art/en/ nafas/articles/2016/ossama-mohammed/. 60 Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 61 Wedeen, ‘Ossama Mohammed: Resilience and Poetic Creativity against All Odds’, 2016. 62 Nick Vivarelli, ‘Cannes: Syrian Director Talks “Silvered Water”, Filming Revolution on Cell Phones’, Variety (17 May 2014). 63 Wedeen, ‘Ossama Mohammed: Resilience and Poetic Creativity against All Odds’, 2016. 64 Karin Badt, ‘Filming Killing: “Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait” by Ossama Mohammed an Wiam Simav Bedirxan’, Huffington Post, 22 January 2015. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Wedeen, ‘Ossama Mohammed: Resilience and Poetic Creativity against All Odds’, 2016. 68 Badt, ‘Filming Killing: “Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait” ’. 69 Ginsberg and Lippard, Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema, p. 264. 70 Cooke, Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official, p. 107; Ginsberg and Lippard, Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema, p. 264; Salti, ‘The Paradoxes of Syrian Cinema’, pp. 1–22. 71 Shafik, Arab Cinema, p. 184. 72 Cooke, Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official, p. 107. 73 Ibid., pp. 115–16. 74 Ibid., p. 116.

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75 Ibid. 76 Ginsberg and Lippard, Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema, p. 264. 77 Cooke, Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official, p. 117; Ginsberg and Lippard, Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema, p. 264. 78 Cooke, Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official, p. 117. 79 Rasha Salti, ‘This Woman’s Work: Filming Defeat in the Arabic Idiom: Poetry, Cinema, and the Saving Grace of Hala Alabdallah’, in F. Laviosa (ed.), Visions of Struggle in Women’s Filmmaking in the Mediterranean (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 169; Stefanie van de Peer, ‘Hala Alabdallah Yakoub: Documentary as Poetic Subjective Experience in Syria’, in van de Peer, Stefanie, Negotiating Dissidence; The Pioneering Women of Arab Documentary (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). 80 Syria Untold, ‘Hala Alabdallah’ (2013), Syrian Untold. Available at http://www. syriauntold.com/en/creative/hala-alabdalla/. 81 van de Peer, ‘Hala Alabdallah Yakoub: Documentary as Poetic Subjective Experience in Syria’, 2017. 82 Ibid. 83 Salti, ‘This Woman’s Work’, 2010. 84 Ibid., p. 168. 85 van de Peer, ‘Hala Alabdallah Yakoub: Documentary as Poetic Subjective Experience in Syria’, 2017. 86 Ibid., p. 172. 87 Interview with author, 29 July 2017. 88 Salti, ‘This Woman’s Work’, p. 173. 89 Ibid., p. 171. 90 Ibid., p. 172. 91 Salti, ‘This Woman’s Work’. p. 175. 92 Syria Untold, ‘Hala Alabdallah’. 93 van de Peer, ‘Hala Alabdallah Yakoub: Documentary as Poetic Subjective Experience in Syria’, 2017; Salti, ‘This Woman’s Work’, p. 176. 94 Salti, ‘This Woman’s Work’, p. 177. 95 Ibid., p. 178. 96 Miriam Cooke, Dancing in Damascus: Creativity, Resilience, and the Syrian Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2017). 97 Antonia Naim, Hala al-Abdallah, Syrian filmmaker ‘In Syria We Are Building a Revolution in Cinema’, EuroMed (2011). Available at http://euromedaudiovisuel. net/p.aspx?t=interviews&mid=91&l=en&did=458. 98 van de Peer, ‘The Moderation of Creative Dissidence in Syria’, pp. 195–6. 99 Florence Ollivry, ‘La situation du documentaire en Syrie: rencontre avec Hala Alabdalla’. 100 van de Peer, ‘Hala Alabdallah Yakoub: Documentary as Poetic Subjective Experience in Syria’, 2017.

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101 Christa Salamandra, ‘Nabil Maleh: Syria’s Leopard’, in Josef Gugler (ed.), Ten Arab Filmmakers: Political Dissent and Social Critique (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). 102 Yunis, Alia, ‘A Leopard in Winter: An Interview with Syrian Director Nabil Maleh’, Jadaliyya (29 January 2013). Available at http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/ index/9845/a-leopard-in-winter_an-interview-with-syrian-direc. 103 Ibid. 104 Besides premiering at the Malmö Arab Film Festival in 2013, the Road to Damascus (2006) was screened at several places worldwide, when Nabil went into exile in Dubai. Maleh’s YouTube channel shows the films in two parts, as well as his docudrama The Holy Crystal (2008) and his major feature film The Extras (1993). https://www.youtube.com/channel/ UCEyje7bvC932N5PpaJ-lXLQ. 105 Pers. Comm. with author, 19 September 2013. 106 Alice Bonfatti, ‘The Socio-economic Roots of Syria’s Uprising’ Al Jumhuriya (21 September 2017). Available at https://www.aljumhuriya.net/en/content/ socio-economic-roots-syria%E2%80%99s-uprising. 107 The visit of Nabil Maleh to Beit Akkad took place in spring of 2010 and was well attended and someone in the audience filmed it and uploaded it on YouTube. The sound is a of very low quality. Available at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=V4l-xWig0o8. 108 Ginsberg and Lippard, Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema, p. 266. 109 Interview with author, 28 August 2014. 110 Roy Armes, Arab Filmmakers of the Middle East: A Dictionary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). 111 The Witness Series is main documentary strand of Al Jazeera English (AJE), broadcasting twenty-six-minute slots on a weekly basis, worldwide. Although the film was produced in 2006, AJE bought the rights for distribution. Available at http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/witness/2010/07/20107411724695523.html. 112 Interview with author, 10 March 2017. 113 Kennedy-Day, ‘Cinema in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Kuwait’, pp. 365–7. 114 Interview with author, 10 March 2017. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid. 117 Ginsberg and Lippard, Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema, p. 438. 118 Ibid. 119 Grace Bello, ‘Mohammad Ali Atassi: Syria in Its Own Image’, Guernica (16 February 2015). Available at https://www.guernicamag.com/ syria-in-its-own-image/. 120 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htdoCxAFf9c.

Notes 1 21 122 123 124 125

275

Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYFrqFB4caU. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLs6yvDq_NQ. Interview with author, 9 September 2017. Interview with author, 24 April 2016. Flynt Everett, Inheriting Syria: Bashar’s Trial by Fire (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005), p. 168. 126 Interview with author, 24 April 2016. 127 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFOdOdCVKiE&t=108s. 128 Interview with author, 24 April 2016. 129 Yassin al-Haj Saleh, The Impossible Revolution, Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy (London: Haymarket Books, 2017). 130 Interview with author, 24 April 2016. 131 Bello, ‘Mohammad Ali Atassi: Syria in Its Own Image’. 132 Corinne Segal, ‘Syrian Filmmakers Tell the Stories You Aren’t Hearing about the Syrian War’, PBS News Hour (4 January 2016). Available at http://www.pbs.org/ newshour/art/syrian-filmmakers-tell-the-stories-you-arent-hearing-aboutthe-syrian-war/. 133 Anne Barnard, ‘When a Revolt Goes Wrong; in “Our Terrible Country”, Mohammad Ali Atassi Explores the Syrian Revolt’, New York Times (16 January 2015). Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/17/arts/in-our-terriblecountry-mohammad-ali-atassi-explores-the-syrian-revolt.html. 134 Interview with author, 24 April 2016. 135 Barnard, ‘When a Revolt Goes Wrong; in “Our Terrible Country”; Segal, ‘Syrian Filmmakers Tell the Stories You Aren’t Hearing about the Syrian War’. 136 Bello, ‘Mohammad Ali Atassi: Syria in Its Own Image; Barnard, ‘When a Revolt Goes Wrong; in “Our Terrible Country” ’. 137 Bello, ‘Mohammad Ali Atassi: Syria in Its Own Image’. 138 Interview with author, 24 April 2016. 139 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=857iUro5f-A&t=40s. 140 Interview with author, 9 September 2017. 141 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D12SdUJTzM. 142 Interview with author, 24 April 2016. 143 Ibid.

2  Inspired by the masters, a new generation 1 Rasha Salti, ‘Nadi al-Sinama in Damascus or When Cinema Wielded Power to Threaten the Social Order’, Arte East Quarterly (Spring Issue, 2008). 2 Salti, ‘Paradoxes of Syrian Cinema’, Kosmorama, 237 (2006).

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3 The statement declared that ‘no reform, be it economic, administrative or legal, will achieve tranquility and stability in the country unless fully accompanied by the desired political reform’. Signatories included Michel Kilo, Antoun al-Maqdisi, Adonis, Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, Fares al-Helou, Abdullah Hannah and Sareba al-Atassi. Alan George, Syria, Neither Bread Nor Freedom (London: Zed Books, 2003), p. 40. 4 van de Peer, ‘The Moderation of Creative Dissidence in Syria: Reem Ali’s Documentary Zabad’, in ‘A. Valassopoulos (ed.), Arab Cultural Studies: History, Politics and the Popular (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 195–6; Salti, ‘Nadi al-Sinama in Damascus’, 2008. 5 Omar Amiralay, ‘Documentary, History and Memory’, DI/VISIONS. Kultur und Politik im Nahen Osten, Stimmen, Gespräche, Projektionen, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2007). Available at https://www.hkw.de/de/app/mediathek/video/40294. 6 Hakam Baba, ‘The Syrian Media Transforms the Syrian Citizen into an Ape’, Middle East Transparent (27 May 2006). Available at https://www.metransparent.com/old/ texts/hakam_baba/hakam_baba_syrian_media_transforms_the_syrian_citizen_ into_an_ape.htm. 7 Joude Gorani, ‘Before Vanishing’ (2005), [Vimeo]. Available at https://vimeo. com/96206780 (accessed 15 February 2017). 8 Interview with author, 15 February 2017. 9 Ibid. 10 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj28-ob1FSk. 11 Interview with author, 15 February 2017. 12 Ibid. 13 The call from Syrian film-makers was published on a Facebook page on 29 April 2001 and undersigned by almost all Syrian documentary film-makers and over a 1,000 film-makers worldwide. It called for stopping the killing of unarmed protesters who just demand their basic rights to freedom. 14 Interview with author, 15 February 2017. 15 Interview with author, 13 September 2017. 16 Jonas Hjort, ‘Farah, Haji and Omran, voices from Syria’, Louisiana Channel, 2013. Available at http://channel.louisiana.dk/video/farah-haji-omran-voices-syria. 17 Ibid. 18 More information available at http://www.dohafilminstitute.com/financing/ projects/grants/a-comedian-in-a-syrian-tragedy and at http://www.finalcutforreal. dk/a-comedian-in-a-syrian-tragedy/. 19 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT86OjVRWJQ. 20 Laura U. Marks, Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015), pp. 103–4. 21 Stefanie van de Peer, ‘The Moderation of Creative Dissidence in Syria: Reem Ali’s Documentary Zabad’, Journal for Cultural Research 16/2–3 (2012), pp. 297–317. 22 van de Peer, ‘The Moderation of Creative Dissidence in Syria’, pp. 201–2. 23 Interview with author, 29 July 2017.

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24 Ammar al Beik, ‘Light Harvest’ (2012), [Vimeo]. Available at https://vimeo. com/40406131 (accessed 1 July 2017). 25 Interview with author, 29 July 2017. 26 Mouna Hamdan, ‘Father Paolo: The “Icon” of the Syrian Revolution’, Al Monitor (13 August 2013). Also available https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/politics/2013/08/ syria-italian-priest-abducted-raqqa.html (accessed 13 July 2017). 27 Tahrir Souri, ‘Father Paolo’s Execution in July 2013 in the Hands of the ISIS’, Tahrir Souri (28 May 2014). Available at http://archive.li/cChqg#selection-814.0–814.3. 28 Marius Kociejowski, Zoroaster’s Children: And Other Travels (Ontario: Biblioasis, 2016). 29 Ammar al-Beik in Isqineeha, ‘Feature Syrian Artist Ammar al Beik’, Isqineeha (24 December 2014). Available at http://isqineeha.tumblr.com/post/106092110174/ feature-syrian-artist-ammar-al-beik. 30 Interview with author, 29 July 2017. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Nadia Muhanna, ‘Interview with Syrian Filmmaker Hazim al-Hamwi’, Blogpost Nadia Muhanna’s Blog (12 October 2010). Available at https://nadiamuhanna. wordpress.com/2010/10/12/interview-with-syrian-filmmaker-hazim-al-hamwi/. 35 Interview with author, 4 June 2017. 36 This is the same Ghassan Jibai who appears in Hala Mohammed’s earlier film Journey into Memory (2006). 37 EUROMED, ‘Hazem Al Hamwi, Syrian Director and Producer’ (9 June 2011). Available at http://euromedaudiovisuel.net/p.aspx?t=videos&mid=103&l=en& did=464. 38 EUROMED, ‘Hazem Al Hamwi, Syrian Director and Producer “In the Arab World We Need to Know More about Producing”’ (8 November 2012). Available at http:// euromedaudiovisuel.net/p.aspx?t=news&mid=21&l=en&did=1025. 39 Interview with author, 4 June 2017. 40 Tidi von Tiedeman and Simone Gemmer, ‘Portrait Alfoz Tanjour’, Arte (5 April 2017). Available at http://cinema.arte.tv/fr/article/portrait-alfoz-tanjour. 41 Monika Piorkowska, ‘EDUCULT Talks: with Linda Zahra and Alfoz Tanjour’, EduCult (14 March 2016). Available at http://educult.at/en/blog/ educult-im-gespraech-mit-linda-zahra-und-alfoz-tanjour/. 42 Ibid. 43 Available at http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeeraworld/2014/03/syriabattle-beyond-2014311145335708747.html. 44 Available at http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeerawo rld/2015/03/150325072934200.html. 45 The revolutionary song translated version is as follows: Oh mum, no, no

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What happened to Aleppo? No, no, mum A child was killed. What has he done? We won’t go away And do what the tyrant wants Freedom, Freedom, we want Freedom Despite your will, ya Bashar We will get our Freedom They called Homs, Dera’a and Deir Ezzor terrorists The Syrian people only want some Freedom Syria will be liberated from this tyranny Whoever kills his own people is not human Freedom, Freedom, we want Freedom Despite your will, ya Bashar We will get our Freedom 46 Mohammed Rouda, ‘Alfuz Tanjour: Asylum Seeking is a Painful Experience on Pyschological, Humanitarian Levels’, Asharq Al-Awsat (29 December 2016). 47 Miriam Cooke, Dancing in Damascus: Creativity, Resilience, and the Syrian Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2017), p. 66. 48 Ibid. 49 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1113&v= B-U9MXOWsYM. 50 Miriam Cooke, Dancing in Damascus. p. 62. 51 Interview with author, 23 March 2018. 52 Interview with author, 20 June 2017. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Pers. Comm. with Issa Touma per Skype 2013. 56 Interview with author, 19 July 2017. 57 Available at https://vimeo.com/50071181. 58 Interview with author, 15 February 2017. 59 Melanie Goodfellow, ‘Syria’s Proaction Film Rebrands as No Nation Films’, Screen Daily (14 December 2016). Available at https://www.screendaily.com/news/syriasproaction-film-rebrands-as-no-nation-films/5112202.article. 60 Interview with author, 8 May 2017. 61 Ibid. 62 ‘Street Foundation’, Syria Untold (23 March 2014). Available at http://www. syriauntold.com/en/work_group/street-foundation/. 63 Interview with author, 8 May 2017. 64 Ibid. 65 Available at http://ashar3.com/portfolio/documentaries/. 66 Available at https://www.facebook.com/notes/126777020733985/.

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67 Chad Elias and Zaher Omareen, ‘Syria’s Imperfect Cinema,’ in M. Halasa, Z. Omareen and N. Mahfoud (eds), Syria Speaks Art and Culture from the Frontline (London: Saqi Books, 2014), pp. 257–69.

3  Documentaries for social change, the case of Bassel Shehadeh In this chapter I rely on several long interviews with friends and family of Bassel Shehadeh, either in person or via Skype. Out of security considerations, some of them have requested to stay anonymous, therefore no names are shared. 1 Interview with author, 8 May 2017. 2 Email exchange, 6 June 2012. The film-maker’s name is not given as the film-maker in question prefers to stay anonymous out of security considerations. 3 Available at https://razanghazzawi.org/2012/12/03/and-youre-still-dead/. 4 Interview with author, 8 May 2017. 5 Ibid. 6 Interview with author, 18 May 2017. 7 Ibid. 8 Interview with Father Frans van der Lugt about the al-Ard centre and hiking tours in Syria is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iqbpY3g6Sk; Since 2017, Syrians in Europe have re-established the Frans’s hike in European countries, starting in Abouna Francis’s home country, the Netherlands. More hikes have been organized, which were attended by young Syrians from all over Europe. Qisetna, ‘Frans’ Hike’ (18 June 2017). https://talkingsyria. com/2017/06/18/frans-hike/. 9 Interview with author, 9 May 2017. 10 Interview with author, 18 May 2017. 11 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q86-q8q5e0k. 12 Bassel Shehadeh uploaded these videos on his own personal YouTube channel. Available at https://www.youtube.com/user/shBassel/videos. 13 Interview with author, 8 May 2017. 14 Interview with author, 9 May 2017. 15 Interview with author, 18 May 2017. 16 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-faG-Zq4Tg. 17 Interview with author, 18 May 2017. 18 Ibid. 19 Interview with author, 9 May 2017. 20 Interview with author, 18 May 2017. 21 Interview with author, 6 June 2017. 22 Interview with author, 9 May 2017. 23 Interview with author, 18 May 2017.

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24 Interview with author, 6 June 2017. 25 Ibid. 26 Interview with author, 18 May 2017. 27 Ibid. 28 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-zO76UT8K8. 29 Interview with author, 18 May 2017. 30 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIG3AEjFLAM. 31 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdUNgN9BbzE. 32 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Luu-DDJzYpQ. 33 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nem33Ow8wb4. 34 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v5Rj3AwWy0.

Part 2  Eyewitnesses of a revolution 1 Joshka Wessels, ‘Syria Lifts Ban on Facebook and YouTube, Reflections on the “Egypt Effect’ in Syria” ’, Blogpost Media Water and Peace in the Middle East (11 February 2011). Available at https://sapiensproductions.wordpress. com/2011/02/11/syria-lifts-ban-on-facebook-and-youtube-reflections-on-the%e2%80%9cegypt-effect%e2%80%9d-in-syria-by-joshka-wessels/ (accessed 11 February 2011). 2 Tina Askanius, ‘DIY Dying: Video Activism as Archive, Commemoration and Evidence’, International Journal of E-Politics 3/1 (2012), pp. 12–25; Lena Jayyusi and Anne Sofie Roald (eds), Media and Political Contestation in the Contemporary Arab World: A Decade of Change (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy, Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 3 Christoph Koettl, ‘The YouTube War: Citizen Videos Revolutionize Human Rights Monitoring in Syria’, Media Shift (18 February 2014). Available at www.pbs.org/mediashift/2014/02/the-youtube-war-citizenvideos-revolutionize-human-rights-monitoring-in-syria/; Chad Elias and Zaher Omareen, ‘Syria’s Imperfect Cinema’, in Malu Halasa, Zaher Omareen and Nawara Mahfoud (eds), Syria Speaks Art and Culture from the Frontline (London: Saqi Books, 2014), pp. 257–69; Omar Al-Ghazzi, ‘“Citizen Journalism” in the Syrian Uprising: Problematizing Western Narratives in a Local Context’, Communication Theory 24/4 (2014), pp. 435–54; Ugur Ümit Üngör, ‘Mass Murder on YouTube: How Should We Look at Syrian Video Clips?’, Your Middle East (17 February 2015). Available at http://www.yourmiddleeast.com/culture/ mass-murder-on-youtube-how-should-we-look-at-syrian-video-clips_29961.

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4 Anwar Al-Bunni, ‘Syria’s Crisis of Expression’, Arab Insight 2/1 (2008), pp. 99–106; Alan George, Syria: Neither Bread Nor Freedom (London: Zed Books, 2003); Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 5 Joshka Wessels, ‘Syrian Masquerades of War’, in Christine Sylvester (ed.), Masquerades of War (London: Routledge, 2015); Wessels, ‘Syria Lifts Ban on Facebook and YouTube’; Elias and Omareen, ‘Syria’s Imperfect Cinema’, pp. 257–69. 6 Lilie Chouliaraki, The Spectatorship of Suffering (London: Sage, 2006); Kari Andén-Papadopoulos, Kari, ‘Citizen Camera-witnessing: Embodied Political Dissent in the Age of Mediated Mass Self-Communication’, New Media & Society 16/5 (2014), pp. 753–69. 7 Rana Khalaf, Oula Ramadan and Friederike Stolleis, ‘Activism in Difficult Times, Civil Society Groups in Syria 2011–2014’, Badael Project and Friedrich-EbertStiftung (Lebanon: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2014). 8 Walid Daou, ‘The Experience of Local Councils in the Syrian Revolution’ (Al Mansour, 2017). Available at http://al-manshour.org/node/7415 (accessed 05 May 2017). 9 Charlotte Bank, ‘On the Need to Act Quickly’, Springerin, 3/12 (2012). Available at https://www.springerin.at/en/2012/3/von-der-notwendigkeit- schnellen-agierens/. 10 Amal Hanano (Lina Sergie Attar), ‘The Real Me and The Hypothetical Syrian Revolution’ (Part 2) (Jadaliyya, 2012). Available at http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/ index/4788/the-real-me-and-the-hypothetical-syrian-revolution. 11 Ibid. 12 Al Karama, ‘Syria: 19-Year Old Female Blogger in Secret Detention’ (Al Karama, 2010). Available at https://www.alkarama.org/en/articles/ syria-19-year-old-female-blogger-secret-detention. 13 Hanano, ‘The Real Me and the Hypothetical Syrian Revolution’. 14 Ibid.

4  Syrian emergency cinema and YouTube 1 Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution. Available at http://www. creativememory.org/?page_id=134. 2 Arab Film and Media Institute, ‘The State of Syrian Film’ (USA: 2012). Available at https://arabfilminstitute.org/the-state-of-syrian-film/. 3 Boëx, ‘Emergency Cinema; an Interview with Syrian Collective Abounaddara’ (2012), [Books & Ideas.Net.] Available at: http://www.booksandideas.net/ Emergency-Cinema.html (accessed 2 March 2013). 4 Ibid.

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5 Documenta14 de. Available at http://www.documenta14.de/en/calendar/25072/ on-revolution. 6 Stefan Tarnowski, ‘What Have We Been Watching?’, Bidayyat (5 May 2017). 7 Ibid. 8 Faris Rifai, ‘Detainees: Osama al-Habali Executed in Sednaya Prison, Sister Says’, Zaman al Wasl (25 May 2017). Available at https://en.zamanalwsl.net/news/article/26469/. 9 Available at https://cpj.org/data/people/osama-al-habaly/. 10 Available at http://sn4hr.org/sites/news/2017/05/24/ media-activist-died-due-torture-syrian-regime-saydnaya-prison-may-23/. 11 James M. Jasper, ‘Emotions and Social Movements: Twenty Years of Theory and Research’ Annual Review of Sociology 37/1 (2011), pp. 285–303. 12 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (Orlando: Harcourt Inc., 1969), pp. 52–6. 13 Available at https://www.arabfilm.com/item_print.html?itemID=584. 14 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (Orlando: Harcourt Inc., 1969), pp. 52–3; Hannah Arendt, ‘A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence’, New York Review of Books (27 February 1969). Available at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1969/02/27/aspecial-supplement-refl ections-on-violence/#fn-33. 15 Jessica Jacobs, ‘Listen with Your Eyes; towards a Filmic Geography’, Geography Compass 7/10 (2013), pp. 714–28. 16 Jay Ruby, Sara Pink, Joshka Wessels and David MacDougall, ‘Visual Anthropology: Digital Video’, Anthropology Today 17/5 (2001), pp. 23–5. 17 Jacobs, ‘Listen with Your Eyes; towards a Filmic Geography’, pp. 714–28. 18 Jens Schroter, ‘On the Logic of the Digital Archive’, in Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (eds), The YouTube Reader (Stockholm: Wallflower Press, 2009); Tina Askanius, ‘DIY Dying: Video Activism as Archive, Commemoration and Evidence’, International Journal of E-Politics 3/1 (2012), pp. 12–25. 19 Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy, Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 20 Omar Al-Ghazzi, ‘“Citizen Journalism” in the Syrian Uprising: Problematizing Western Narratives in a Local Context’, Communication Theory 24/4 (2014), pp. 435–54; Sadok Hammami, ‘The Three Phases of Facebook: Social Networks and the Public Sphere in the Arab World – the Case of the Tunisian Revolution’, in L. Jayyusi and A. S. Roald (eds), Media and Political Contestation in the Contemporary Arab World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 21 Sadok Hammami, ‘The Three Phases of Facebook’. 22 Omar Al-Ghazzi, ‘ “Citizen Journalism” in the Syrian Uprising’, pp. 435–54. 23 Jon Prosser, Image-based Research: A Sourcebook for Qualitative Researchers (London: Routledge, 1998). 24 Dziga Vertov, ‘We: Variant of a Manifesto’, Kino-Fot 1 (1922), pp. 25–31. 25 Mikhael I. Trifonov and Dmitry A. Ugolev, ‘Uncertainty Principle in Human Visual Perception’, Proceedings of SPIE – The International Society for Optical Engineering 5/2 (1994), pp. 60–9.

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26 Duco A. Schreuder, Vision and Visual Perception: The Conscious Base of Seeing (London: Archway, 2014). 27 Ollivry, ‘La situation du documentaire en Syrie: rencontre avec Hala Alabdalla’. 28 Prosser, Image-based Research, 1998. 29 Peter Snowdon, ‘The Revolution Will Be Uploaded: Vernacular Video and the Arab Spring’, Journal of Current Cultural Research 6 (2014), pp. 401–29. 30 Ibid. 31 Koettl, ‘The YouTube War: Citizen Videos Revolutionize Human Rights Monitoring in Syria’, Media Shift (18 February 2014). Available at www.pbs.org/ mediashift/2014/02/the-youtube-war-citizen-videos-revolutionizehuman-rights-monitoring-in-syria/. 32 Yallasouria, ‘#Syria, let us remember Hasan Ali Akleh from Hassakeh’, Blogpost (26 January 2014). Available at https://yallasouriya.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/syrialet-us-remember-hasan-ali-akleh-from-hassakeh/ (Accessed 27 January 2014). 33 Interview with author, 1 February 2011. 34 Rania Abouzeid, ‘The Syrian Style of Repression: Thugs and Lectures’, Time Magazine (27 February 2011). Available at http://content.time.com/time/world/ article/0,8599,2055713,00.html. 35 Interview with author, 3 February 2011. 36 Ibid. 37 Lisa Wedeen, ‘Acting “As If ”: Symbolic Politics and Social Control in Syria’, Society for Comparative Study of Society and History (1998), pp. 503–23. 38 Elias and Omareen, ‘Syria’s Imperfect Cinema’, pp. 257–69. 39 Ibid. 40 Malu Halasa, ‘Mystery Shopper: Interview with Assaad al-Achi’, in M. Halasa, Z. Omareen and N. Mahfoud (eds), Syria Speaks Art and Culture from the Frontline (London: Saqi Books, 2014). 41 Petra Stienen, Dromen van een Arabische lente een Nederlandse diplomate in het Midden-Oosten (Amsterdam: Nieuw Amsterdam Uitgevers, 2008). 42 Alan George, Syria: Neither Bread Nor Freedom (London: Zed Books, 2003). 43 Al-Bunni, ‘Syria’s Crisis of Expression’, pp. 99–106. 44 Ibid. 45 Lisa Wedeen, ‘Ideology and Humor in Dark Times: Notes from Syria’, Critical Inquiry 39 (2013), pp. 841–73. 46 Liz Sly, ‘Torture of Boy Reinvigorates Syria’s Protest Movement’, The Washington Post (29 May 2011). Available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/ middle-east/torture-of-boy-reinvigorates-syrias-protest-movement/2011/05/29/ AGPwIREH_story.html. 47 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjwC_-bKGhs. 48 Interview with author, 3 September 2014. 49 Ugur Ümit Üngör, ‘Mass Violence in Syria: A Preliminary Analysis’, New Middle Eastern Studies 3 (2013), pp. 1–22.

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50 Ibid. 51 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xlRDgVh6Dg&list=UUDrnROq HtRoes4MXz_hsgTg&feature=plcp. 52 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C7qIL1M6lw. 53 Judith Butler, Precarious Life, the Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004).

5  The view from below: Video activism from the North 1 2 3 4

Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSWqFD7fArI. Interview with author, 28 August 2014. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKYp6sWonhM. Zeina Erhaim speech at World Humanitarian Summit, session meeting, Istanbul, 23–24 May 2016. 5 Omar Al-Ghazzi, ‘“Citizen Journalism” in the Syrian Uprising: Problematizing Western Narratives in a Local Context’, Communication Theory 24/4 (2014), pp. 435–54; Andén-Papadopoulos, Kari, ‘Citizen Camera-Witnessing: Embodied Political Dissent in the Age of Mediated Mass Self-Communication’, New Media & Society 16/5 (2014), pp. 753–69. 6 Dan Zahavi, Self and Other, Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy and Shame (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 7 Peter Snowdon, ‘The Revolution Will Be Uploaded: Vernacular Video and the Arab Spring’, Journal of Current Cultural Research 6 (2014), pp. 401–29. 8 Available at https://youtu.be/SZcCbIPM37w. 9 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtLUme-hS44. 10 Lilie Chourialaki, The Ironic Spectator, Solidarity in the Age of PostHumanitarianism (Cambridge: Polity, 2013). 11 Tina Askanius, ‘DIY Dying: Video Activism as Archive, Commemoration and Evidence’, International Journal of E-Politics 3/1 (2012), pp. 12–25; AndénPapadopoulos, ‘Citizen Camera-witnessing’, pp. 753–69. 12 Interview with author, 28 August 2014. 13 Ibid. 14 Interview with author, 3 September 2014. 15 Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of the Black Insurgency 1930–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Jason MacLeod, ‘Building Resilience to Repression in Nonviolent Resistance Struggles’, Journal of Resistance Studies 1/1 (2015), pp. 77–118. 16 MacLeod, ‘Building resilience to repression in nonviolent resistance struggles’, pp. 77–118.

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17 Collins, Randall, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 18 Interview with author, 27 Augustus 2014. 19 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4a_LU_4vJo. 20 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL1DXtOZWtc. 21 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJr3QCfwC2g. 22 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Auj1lL7w-Oo. 23 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0LVzCqP9lE. 24 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w95f1km8Hk. 25 Interview with author, 03 September 2014. 26 Chourialaki, The Ironic Spectator. 27 Butler, Precarious Life. 28 Yahya R. Kamalipour and Nancy Snow, War, Media and Propaganda, a Global Perspective (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). 29 Yassin al-Haj Saleh, The Impossible Revolution Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy (London: Haymarket Books, 2017). 30 Josepha Wessels, ‘White Phosphorus over Raqqa’, Open Democracy (12 June 2017). Available at https://www.opendemocracy.net/north-africa-west-asia/josephaivanka-wessels/white-phosphorus-over-raqqa (accessed 12 June 2017). 31 Michael Young, ‘The Triumph of Politicide’, Carnegie Middle East Centre (21 August 2017). Available at https://carnegie-mec.org/diwan/72850 (accessed 22 August 2017). 32 Syrian Network for Human Rights Report (1 January 2017). Available at https:// sn4hr.org/wp-content/pdf/english/16913_civilians_killed_in_2016_en.pdf.

6  Politics of the image: Relations with international media 1 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. xxvi. 2 Lilie Chourialaki, The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of PostHumanitarianism (Cambridge: Polity, 2013). 3 Lina Khatib, Image Politics in the Middle East: The Role of the Visual in Political Struggle (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012). 4 Lina Khatib, Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006). 5 Ruth García-Gavilanes, Milena Tsvetkova, Taha Yasseri, ‘Dynamics and Biases of Online Attention: The Case of Aircraft Crashes’, Royal Society Open Science 3/10 (2016). 6 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

286

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7 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’, in J. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood, 1986), pp. 241–58. 8 Interview with author, 26 August 2014. 9 Interview with author, 7 September 2014. 10 Interview with author, 27 August 2014. 11 Robert Fisk, ‘Inside Darayya – How a Failed Prisoner Swap Turned into a Massacre’, The Independent (29 August 2012). Available at http://www.independent.co.uk/ voices/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-inside-daraya-how-a-failed-prisoner-swapturned-into-a-massacre-8084727.html. 12 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKpTJIRFBm4. 13 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgVRWMtuwsE. 14 Janine di Giovanni, ‘Syria Crisis: Daraya Massacre Leaves a Ghost Town still Counting Its Dead’, The Guardian (7 September 2012). Available at https://www. theguardian.com/world/2012/sep/07/syria-daraya-massacre-ghost-town. 15 Janine di Giovanni, The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria (London: Liveright, 2016). 16 Ibid. 17 Yassin al Haj Saleh and Rime Allaf, ‘Syria Dispatches: Robert Fisk’s Independence’, Open Democracy (14 September 2012). Available at https://www.opendemocracy. net/yassin-al-haj-saleh-rime-allaf/syria-dispatches-robert-fisks-independence (accessed 14 September 2012). 18 Ibid. 19 Reporters without Borders, ‘RSF condemns Swedish radio reporter’s expulsion from Aleppo (16 December 2016). https://rsf.org/en/news/rsf-condemnsswedish-radio-reporters-expulsion-aleppo. 20 Josepha Wessels, ‘White Phosphorus over Raqqa’, Open Democracy (12 June 2017). Available at https://www.opendemocracy.net/north-africa-west-asia/ josepha-ivanka-wessels/white-phosphorus-over-raqqa. 21 Interview with author, 27 Augustus 2014. 22 Interview with author, 4 September 2014. 23 Interview with author, 3 September 2014. 24 Video recording of this meeting available at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=jJv3qdQ780A. 25 Edward Said, ‘Orientalism Once More’, Lecture at 50th Anniversary of the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, the Netherlands, 21 May 2003. 26 Reuters, ‘Documentary Film Follows Would-Be Suicide Bombers in Syria’. Available at http://www.reuters.com/article/us-film-dugmathebutton-idUSKCN10D1WZ. 27 Person. Comm. 8 May 2017. 28 Budour Yousef Hassan, ‘Where Is the Photographer of Yarmouk?’ Electronic Intifada (6 June 2016). Available at https://electronicintifada.net/content/wherephotographer-yarmouk/16981 (accessed 12 June 2016).

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29 Budour Yousef Hassan, ‘“Siding with Life in the Face of Death”: Photographer Captures Siege on Palestinians in Syria’, Electronic Intifada (17 December 2014). Available at https://electronicintifada.net/content/siding-life-facedeath-photographer-captures-siege-palestinians-syria/14089 (accessed 21 December 2014). 30 Ibid. 31 Budour Yousef Hassan, ‘Where Is the Photographer of Yarmouk?’. 32 Ibid.

7  To tell the world! Evidencing war crimes and virtual reality 1 Joshka Wessels, ‘Syria’s First Mobile Phone Films Festival Celebrates New Tool for Civil Resistance’, Your Middle East (9 December 2014). Available at http://www. yourmiddleeast.com/culture/syrias-first-mobile-phone-films-festival-celebratesnew-tool-for-civil-resistance-video_28449. 2 Hugh Macleod and Annasofie Flamand, ‘Hama’s Rise Is Regime’s Recurring Nightmare’, Al Jazeera News (11 July 2011). Available at http://www.aljazeera.com/ INDEPTH/FEATURES/2011/07/2011710133017725536.html. 3 Website Al-Share3. Available at http://ashar3.com/#the-team. 4 Website Al-Share3. Available at http://ashar3.com/. 5 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY97DLde3XA. 6 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov3QYsDAYvA&bp ctr=1504277699. 7 Lina Sinjab, ‘An Emotional Farewell to Damascus’, BBC News (8 June 2013). Available at http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-22826636. 8 Interview with author, 27 August 2014. 9 Yasmin Fedda, ‘Syria on the Road: Stories of Conflict, Migration & Place’, The Highlighter Blog (17 November 2015). Available at http://highlightarts.org/ syria-on-the-road-stories-of-conflict-migration-place-by-yasmin-fedda/. 10 Fedda, ‘Syria on the Road: Stories of Conflict, Migration & Place’. 11 Ibid. 12 Jade Jackman, ‘How Mobile Phones Are Driving a Syrian Revolution in Film’, Dazed. Available at http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/30843/1/ how-mobile-phones-are-driving-a-syrian-revolution-in-film. 13 Joshka Wessels, ‘Syrian Masquerades of War’, in Christine Sylvester (ed.), Masquerades of War (London: Routledge, 2015). 14 Trailer False Alarm (2014). Available at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=TPXa9aa_eow.

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15 Al Arabiya, ‘Song Sung Blue: Footage of Singing Syrian Hit by Blast Goes Viral’ (6 February 2013). Available at https://english.alarabiya.net/ articles/2013/02/06/264782.html. 16 Nonny de la Peña, Peggy Weil, Joan Llobera Elias Giannopoulos Ausiàs Pomés, and Bernhard Spanlang, ‘Immersive Journalism: Immersive Virtual Reality for the First-Person Experience of News’, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 19/4 (2010), pp. 291–301. 17 Ibid., p. 298. 18 Ibid., p. 292. 19 Nonny de la Peña, Project Syria, MIT Open Documentary Lab (2014). Available at https://docubase.mit.edu/project/project-syria/. 20 Availabe at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtZrSb84JPE. 21 Interview with author, 9 May 2016. 22 Alessandra Ram, World’s First VR Film Festival Takes You to a Real War Zone, Wired (15 September 2015). Available at https://www.wired.com/2015/09/ vr-film-festival-welcome-to-aleppo/. 23 Askanius, ‘DIY Dying’, p. 13. 24 Interview with author, 27 August 2014. 25 W. H. Goodenough, ‘Moral Outrage: Territoriality in Human Guise’, Zygon 32/1 (1997), pp. 5–27. 26 Ugur Ümit Üngör, ‘Mass Violence in Syria: A Preliminary Analysis’, New Middle Eastern Studies 3 (2013), pp. 1–22. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Kelly Matheson, Video as Evidence, Field Guide (New York: Witness, 2016); Christoph Koettl, ‘The YouTube War: Citizen Videos Revolutionize Human Rights Monitoring in Syria’, Media Shift (18 February 2014). Available at www.pbs. org/mediashift/2014/02/the-youtube-war-citizen-videos-revolutionize-humanrights-monitoring-in-syria/ (accessed 3 March 2014); Alison Cole, Pictures of Atrocity: Turning Video Footage into Evidence of War Crimes (2012). Available at www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/pictures-of-attrocity-turning-videofootage-into-evidence-of-war-crimes (accessed 3 June 2014). 33 Claudia Aradau and Andrew Hill, ‘The Politics of Drawing: Children, Evidence and the Darfur Conflict’, International Political Sociology 7/47 (2013), pp. 368–87. 34 Ibid. 35 Marek Kaminski and Monika Nalepa, ‘Judging Transitional Justice: A New Criterion for Evaluating Truth Revelation Procedures’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 50/3 (2006), pp. 383–408; C. Sandoval Villalba, ‘Transitional Justice: Key Concepts,

Notes

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Processes and Challenges’, IDCR Briefing Paper, Institute for Democracy and Conflict Resolution (IDCR) (2011). 36 Frederick Deknatel, ‘With More Evidence of Assad War Crimes, Is Transitional Justice Possible in Syria?’, World Politics Review (7 August 2014). 37 Cole, ‘Pictures of Atrocity: Turning Video Footage into Evidence of War Crimes’. 38 Ibid. 39 Omar al-Ghazzi, ‘“Citizen Journalism” ’ in the Syrian Uprising: Problematizing Western Narratives in a Local Context’, Communication Theory 24/4 (2014), pp. 435–54. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Interview with author, 27 August 2014. 43 Interview with author, 2 September 2014. 44 Giulia Prati, ‘Between Propaganda and Public Relations: An Analysis of the Bashar al-Assad’s Digital Communications Campaign’, Journal of International Affairs Online, 9/March (2015). 45 Ibid. 46 Koettl, ‘The YouTube War: Citizen Videos Revolutionize Human Rights Monitoring in Syria’; Kelly Matheson, Video as Evidence, Field Guide (New York: Witness, 2016). 47 Matheson, Video as Evidence. 48 Cole, ‘Pictures of Atrocity: Turning Video Footage into Evidence of War Crimes’. 49 Craig Silverman (ed.), Verification Handbook, Ultimate Guideline on Digital Age Sourcing for Emergency Coverage (Maastricht: European Journalism Centre, 2014). 50 Lilie Chouliaraki, The Spectatorship of Suffering (London: Sage, 2008). 51 Nour Kelze and Matthew Van Dyke, ‘Not Anymore: Story of Revolution’ [YouTube] (12 September 2013).

Epilogue 1 Jamil Wali, ‘How This Syrian Escaped Imprisonment and Torture for a New Life in Sweden’, The Local (25 January 2017). 2 Yassin al-Haj Saleh, The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy (London: Haymarket Books, 2017). 3 Josepha Wessels, ‘How Assad Tortures and Kills Syria’s Pacifist Young Leftists’, Open Democracy (4 May 2018). Available at https://www.opendemocracy.net/ north-africa-west-asia/josepha-ivanka-wessels/how-assad-tortures-and-kills-syrias-young-pacifist-young-left (accessed 4 May 2018). 4 Interview with author, 29 July 2017. 5 Interview with author, 26 April 2016. 6 Interview with author, 13 September 2017.

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Index A’zaz 173, 198, 204, 213–14, 236, 247 Abdallah 4, 17, 21, 26, 28–9, 37, 40, 47, 56–63, 71, 109, 115, 131, 179, 218, 225, 237–40 Abdelhamid, Abdellatif 10, 21, 54, 69–70, 93, 257 Abdelke, Yousef 28, 56, 58–60, 109 Abeed, Kareem 261 Abo Gabi 260 Abouna Francis 147, 158–60; see also Father Frans; van der Lugt, Frans Abounaddara 17, 22, 174–5 Abyad, Layla 138, 260 activism 2–6, 9–10, 12, 14, 16–18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44, 46, 48, 50, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60, 62, 64, 66, 68, 70, 72, 74, 76, 78, 80, 82, 84, 86, 90, 92, 94, 96, 98, 100, 102, 104, 106, 108, 110, 112, 114, 116, 118, 120, 122, 124, 126, 128, 130, 132, 134, 136, 138, 140, 142, 144, 146, 148–50, 152, 154, 156, 158, 160, 162, 164, 166–170, 172, 174, 176, 178, 180, 182, 184, 186, 188–90, 192–212, 214, 216, 218, 220, 222, 224, 226, 228, 230, 232, 234, 236, 238, 240–2, 244, 246, 248 activist 9, 12–13, 29, 48, 58, 83, 103, 106, 112, 114, 129, 142–3, 145, 153, 156– 7, 162, 165–7, 173, 175, 181, 186–7, 192–4, 198–200, 202, 206, 213, 215, 220–2, 225, 228–9, 231, 233, 241–2, 246–7; see also activist memory; digital video activists; video activist activist memory 241–2; see also activist; digital video activists; video activist actor 101–3, 136, 230 actress 61, 103, 127, 156 Addounia 216 Adib, Madonna 261 Afghanistan 151, 218 Africa 9, 11, 200 Afrin 224

agricultural 31, 34–5, 39, 110 agriculture 65–7 Ahmad 99, 196, 216 Ahrar al-Sham 85, 189 AIF 22, 24, 62, 87, 90, 100, 103, 117, 172, 188; see also Arab Institute of Film (AIF) Al Arabiya 141, 162, 167–8, 193, 215, 232 Al Jazeera 11, 25, 71–2, 75, 78, 123–4, 135, 168, 215, 220, 233–4; see also Al Jazeera World series Al Jazeera World series 123–4; see also Al Jazeera Al Qaeda 130, 160, 220, 227 al-Abdallah (Yaqoub), Hala 4, 17, 21, 26, 28–9, 47, 56–8, 60, 62, 71, 109, 115, 131, 179, 257 al-Abed, Lina 95, 259 al-Assi Square 141 al-Atassi, Mohammed Ali 4, 21, 78–9, 84–7, 132, 174, 251, 253, 257; see also Atassi; al-Atassi, Nureddin al-Atassi, Nureddin 79–80 al-Batal, Saeed 262 al-Beik, Ammar 57–8, 60, 62, 89, 107–10, 186, 226, 258 al-Dibs, Nidal 65, 93, 95, 97, 257 al-Haj Saleh, Yassin 71–2, 83–6, 209, 217 al-Halaby, Ossama 175, 261 al-Hamwi, Hazem 62, 87, 117–18, 226, 259 al-Homsi, Ziad 83–5, 226, 261 al-Ibrahim, Ali 261 al-Jazrawi 114–15 al-Jeiroudi, Diana 4, 11, 138 al-Khatib, Hamza 14, 117, 185–8, 196 al-Khoury, Maya 175, 257 al-Mokdad, Orwa 87, 261 al-Mubarak, Aous 163–6 al-Roumi, Meyar 91–2, 258 al-Roumi, Mohammed 257 al-Sarout, Abd al-Basit 129

304

Index

al-Share3 129, 139, 174, 232; see also Street Foundation al-Turk, Riad 78–85 al-Zakout, Rafat 226, 259 al-Zouki, Hisham 260 al-Zubaidi, Kais 23, 27, 30, 55, 257 Alani, Ammar 259 Alawite(s) 37, 140, 156 Aleppo 1–3, 5, 19, 27, 44–5, 55–6, 59, 61, 63, 66, 70, 76–8, 93–4, 123–4, 131–5, 140, 145, 149, 153, 169–72, 182–3, 191–4, 197–200, 202, 204–6, 215, 217–18, 221–6, 236–8, 240, 246–7 Aleppo Media Center (AMC) 191–2 Aleppo University 63, 171 eastern Aleppo city 124, 170, 217 Old City of Aleppo 1, 76, 93, 124 Ali Akleh, Hassan 39, 181 Ali, Reem 87, 103–4, 107, 259 Aljnde, Yousef 262 AMC 223, 226, 236, 240 American 11, 13, 39, 41–2, 112, 162–3, 170, 192, 206, 208, 226, 250 American University of Beirut (AUB) 39 Amiralay, Omar 4, 6, 10, 21–2, 24–6, 28–9, 36–7, 40, 44–5, 47, 49, 52, 55–6, 62, 75, 78, 87, 89, 91–2, 94, 103, 167, 172, 174, 256 Amman 23–4, 62, 87, 90, 103, 116–18, 126, 172 Amnesty International (AI) 181, 244, 248 Amsterdam 129, 136 analysis 51, 67, 107, 179, 207, 239, 245 animation 101, 140 anti-regime 11, 17, 103, 154–5, 162–4, 183–4, 186, 189, 216, 229 Anzour, Ismael 21, 255 Arab 1, 4, 9–13, 15–17, 21–5, 28–9, 32, 35, 37–8, 44–6, 52, 54–7, 59, 67, 69, 78–9, 90–1, 100, 103, 117, 119, 127, 129, 134, 137, 140, 158–9, 167–8, 170, 172, 178, 180–1, 185, 187, 189, 195–6, 208, 211, 215–16, 218, 224, 230, 232, 236 Arab cinema 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 23, 44, 54, 57 Arab country 12–13 Arab Diasporas 12 Arab Film Festival 67, 100, 129, 230

Arab Institute of Film (AIF) 4, 22, 90, 172; see also AIF Arab satellite channels 168 Arab Spring 12, 16, 140, 180 Arab Uprisings 9, 167, 180, 195, 224, 232 Arab World 1, 9, 11–12, 24–5, 29, 32, 37–8, 56, 69, 90, 117, 119, 137, 170, 178, 181, 185, 208, 211, 218, 224 Rotterdam Arab Film Festival 100, 129 Syrian Arab Army (SAA) 127, 187, 196, 215–16, 218, 224 Syrian Arab Republic (SAR) 23, 159 Arabic 19, 55, 62–4, 70, 78, 119, 123, 135, 174–5, 197, 199, 214–15, 217–18, 234, 246 Araby, Dana 262 archaeological 74, 147, 149 archaeologists 2 archaeology 148 architecture 148, 163 archive 37–8, 48, 76, 84, 86, 91–2, 125, 127, 133–4, 174, 178, 241–2, 244, 248 archive footage 37–8, 48, 92, 125, 133–4 Arendt, Hannah 176–7 Armenia 94, 120 Armenian 59, 131–4 Armenian genocide 59, 132–4 Arte 37, 46, 119 arts 6, 10, 17, 22, 70, 86, 92, 100, 103, 110, 117, 122, 131, 137, 161 artist 10, 12, 28, 44, 58, 91–92, 101, 107–8, 121, 123, 125, 131, 238 artistic 3–5, 16, 26, 29, 47, 57, 86, 93, 104, 107–9, 111, 117, 121, 133, 137–8, 149, 181; see also artistic production; artistic value artistic production 16 artistic value 107, 133 multimedia artist 107 Arwad (Island) 58, 60 Ashkar, Salah 262 Assad 3, 5–7, 10, 12, 17, 21, 23–6, 30–1, 39–43, 46, 48–9, 51, 57–8, 60, 62–4, 67, 69–71, 76, 78–80, 82–4, 91–2, 101, 104, 107, 110–11, 113, 118–19, 125–7, 134–5, 138, 144, 152, 154, 161, 163–7, 169, 176–7, 181–2, 185, 187–8, 194, 196–9, 203–4, 207–11,

Index 213, 215–18, 220, 222–3, 225, 227–30, 232, 236, 243–4, 246–7 al-Assad, Asma’a 43, 67, 247; see also al-Assad, Bashar; al-Assad, Hafez; Assad; Assad government; Assad regime al-Assad, Bashar 6, 17, 43, 64, 67, 70–1, 78–80, 83, 101, 113, 118, 135, 138, 144, 164–6, 185, 187, 196, 203, 223, 232, 243; see also al-Assad, Hafez; al-Assad, Asma’a; Assad; Assad government; Assad regime al-Assad, Hafez 23–6, 30, 41, 49, 51, 57–8, 60, 67, 76, 79, 83, 91, 110, 232; see also al-Assad, Bashar; al-Assad, Asma’a; Assad; Assad government; Assad regime Assad government 6–7 Assad regime 3, 5–6, 10, 12, 17, 31, 39–40, 42–3, 46, 48–9, 62–3, 67, 69–70, 101, 104, 107, 113, 125–6, 134–5, 152, 161, 163–5, 167, 169, 176, 181–2, 188, 194, 196, 211, 213, 216–18, 220, 227, 236, 243–4, 246–7 Assadist 51, 125, 135, 210; see also Assadist propaganda; Assadist slogans Assadist propaganda 135, 210 Assadist slogans 125 Atassi 4, 21–2, 78–80, 83–7, 132, 174, 182–3; see also al-Atassi, Mohammed Ali; al-Atassi, Nureddin Atmeh 53, 215 atrocities 43, 152, 165, 173, 184, 189, 199, 235, 241 audience(s) 13–15, 28, 37, 43, 45, 52–4, 69, 86–7, 90, 117, 126, 129, 133, 137, 168, 175, 178, 187, 189, 196, 201, 205, 208, 211, 225, 238, 242, 248, 250 audiovisual 22, 86, 100, 160, 169, 173, 178–80, 190, 207, 225, 231, 235, 238 auteur 9–10, 21, 43, 51–2, 54, 57, 60–1, 109–10, 134, 179 authoritarian 5–7, 13, 16–17, 30, 51–2, 57, 60, 164, 167, 169, 176, 181, 184–5, 207, 225 authoritarianism 6, 13, 18, 39, 48, 51, 56, 176 Aziz, Omar 169

305

Ba’athist 4, 24–5, 37, 68, 80, 101, 118, 131 Ba’athist government 24 Ba’athist ideology 24, 101 Ba’athist Socialist Revolution 4 Ba’athist Youth groups 131 Bab al-Hawa 53, 170–1 BAFTA 228, 235 Bambuser 165, 184 barrel bomb 194, 197, 201, 203, 205 Batous, Afraa 261 Bayrakhdar, Faraj 71–2; see also Faraj BBC 95, 138–9, 215, 222, 233 Bedirxan, Wiam Simav 52, 226, 257, 262 Beirut 4, 39, 47–8, 62, 81–3, 86–7, 99, 119, 123, 126–7, 132, 134, 145, 155, 233–4 Berlin 11, 24, 31, 100, 118, 120–1, 127–8, 130, 137–8, 141, 226, 232, 236 Berlinale 87, 121 Bertolucci, Bernardo 115–16 besieged 52, 124, 159–60, 222, 229, 236, 247 Bhutto, Benazir 40–2, 256 Bhutto, Murtaza 41, 43 Bidayyat 11, 22, 86–7, 95, 127, 132, 174, 238 bin Laden 130 Boukhari, Nisrine 260 Boutros, Raymond 257 boy on the beach 14–15, 224; see also Kurdi, Alan broadcaster 11 Brussels 141, 225, 232 byzantine 64, 76, 112–13 Cable News Network (CNN) 214–215, 220, 222; see also CNN camera 1, 4, 13, 16, 25, 32, 35, 47, 50, 52–3, 57–8, 64–5, 73, 79, 84, 92–8, 101–2, 105, 113, 115–16, 118, 121, 127–8, 132–3, 139, 142, 145, 151, 154, 162–4, 166, 175–7, 179–81, 188, 193, 198, 202–5, 217, 222, 228, 232–5, 240–2, 246 cameraman 40, 58, 76, 119, 158, 167, 203–5, 216, 229 XLR camera 139, 151 campaign 41, 139, 152, 174, 210, 217, 223, 232, 247–8 cartoons 118, 211, 236

306

Index

censorship 10, 94, 117, 137, 174, 185, 189 Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) 63 Centre for Resolution of International Conflicts (CRIC) 170 Chad 17, 245 Channel Four News 225 charity 7, 140, 142, 145, 151, 173, 230, 237 children 13–16, 24, 31, 33, 49–50, 52–3, 55, 64–5, 70–1, 73, 83, 95–7, 102, 104, 118, 123–4, 126, 130–1, 134, 141, 150, 156, 161, 163, 184, 186, 200, 205–7, 216, 222, 228, 230, 245 childhood 70–1, 109, 131, 146–7 Christians 68, 112, 147, 154, 160 Christian community 132, 150, 159 Christian Syrians 154 cinema 3–4, 6, 9–13, 15–18, 20–31, 37, 43–6, 49, 51–4, 56–7, 62–3, 66, 68, 75, 77–8, 85–7, 89, 91–5, 97, 107, 109–10, 115, 117, 120, 125, 127–9, 137, 167, 173–5, 177, 179, 181, 183, 185, 187, 189, 191, 211, 226, 231, 240 Alternative Cinema 23, 45 Cine Club 27, 43–5, 47, 54, 56 Cinema Club 21, 26–8, 31, 43 Cinéma d’Auteur 9–10, 54 cinema masters 4, 6, 75, 87, 95, 120 cinema pioneer 128, 240 cinematic 1, 6, 9–12, 17, 23, 27, 43, 47–8, 64 cinematic culture 11–12 cinematographer 40, 44, 47, 62, 75–6, 78, 84, 93–6, 105, 130, 135–6, 166 cinematographic 3, 6, 21, 43, 48, 51, 54, 126, 128, 166 cinematographic resistance 3, 21 cinematography 3, 25, 38, 48–9, 54–5, 58, 77, 89, 93–4, 103, 108–9, 121, 127, 139, 145, 162 Damascus Cinema Club 21, 26, 43 emergency cinema 16, 173–5, 177, 179, 181, 183, 185, 187, 189, 191 Syrian cinema 9–11, 17–18, 20–1, 23, 26–7, 43–6, 49, 51, 54, 56, 62–3, 68, 75, 78, 89, 91–3, 107, 120, 185, 240 civil 12–13, 17, 22, 29, 61, 68, 90, 152, 161, 169, 184–5, 191, 193, 203, 205, 213, 252

civil disobedience 152, 161, 185 civil society 17, 29, 68, 90, 169, 184 civil war 3, 12–13, 61 civilian 12, 42, 182, 193, 210, 220, 229 clips 5, 14, 168, 170, 173, 180, 184, 201, 208–9, 221, 233, 241, 243, 247–8 close-up 33, 38, 50, 57, 74, 105–6, 133, 163, 196 CMES 63; see also Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) CNN 214–15, 220, 222; see also Cable News Network (CNN) coalition 13, 171–2, 189, 208–9, 218, 220, 223–4; see also international coalition; National Coalition Government collective 10, 16–18, 86, 125, 141, 168–9, 174–5, 180–1, 189, 196, 200–1, 204, 208, 211, 221, 225, 231, 247 collective action 18 collective memory 10, 125, 168 collective punishment 208 colonial 12, 19, 40, 208 colonialism 23, 40 comedian 101, 103 comedy 102–3 Committee for Protection of Journalists (CPJ) 176; see also CPJ communication 16, 52, 137, 234 communist 79–80, 104–6 Copenhagen 5, 52, 78, 90, 120, 127, 170, 172, 191, 239 Copenhagen Documentary festival 120 CPH:Dox 9, 52, 131, 191; see also Copenhagen Documentary festival University of Copenhagen 5, 78, 170 correspondent 95, 138, 214, 218, 233; see also foreign correspondents; foreign reporters countryside 6–7, 17, 32–4, 39, 64, 66–7, 125, 131, 139, 146, 198, 222, 232, 236; see also Damascus countryside coverage 138, 145, 164, 167, 207, 213, 215, 222–3 CPJ 225; see also Committee for Protection of Journalists (CPJ) crackdown 13, 48, 98, 101, 124, 129, 155, 184, 190, 224, 234, 242 creative resistance 104, 168–9, 174, 252

Index crew 51, 62, 64, 69, 79, 81–2, 84, 92, 94, 96–9, 127–8, 136–7, 192 CRIC 170; see also Centre for Resolution of International Conflicts (CRIC) crimes 5, 14, 34, 36, 73, 206, 210, 231, 233, 235, 237, 239, 241–7; see also war crimes crisis 7, 48, 65, 90, 113, 139, 194, 224, 238, 247 culture 6, 11–12, 17, 25, 28, 30, 35, 51, 55, 67, 76, 86–7, 99, 123, 136, 208 Dall’Oglio, Paolo 111–12; see also Father Paolo; Paolo Damascene 3, 6, 20, 27–8, 68, 79, 82, 84, 97, 138–9 Damascene Spring 3, 6, 28, 68, 79 Damascus 1, 3–6, 10–12, 17–19, 21–9, 37, 39, 43–5, 47–8, 50, 54, 56–7, 60, 62–70, 72, 76, 78–83, 85–6, 89–91, 93–5, 97–103, 107, 109–12, 116–19, 122, 125–7, 131, 135–42, 144–6, 148–58, 161–5, 173, 182–4, 190, 194, 213, 228–9, 232–3, 237 Damascus countryside 17, 139, 232 Damascus Higher Academy of Arts 137 Damascus School for Fine Arts 131 Damascus Spring 29, 48, 78–9, 90, 183 Damascus University 79, 148 French Cultural Institute in Damascus 146 Old City of Damascus 69, 83, 109, 135, 182, 232 Danish 62, 68, 78, 121, 140, 190, 221; see also Denmark Darayya 98, 180, 216–17 Darayya massacre 216–17 Daret Ezzah 76, 170 Darwish, Mahmoud 24, 162 Deaibes, Nadim 260 declaration 48, 90, 196, 234 defected 162, 165, 196, 218, 246 defection 196 Deir Ezzor 27, 32–5, 65, 147, 206 Deir Mar Musa 111–13, 115, 149 democracy 41–2, 48, 80, 82, 131, 152, 163, 178, 217 Democracy Now! 152

307

democratic 51, 99, 104, 124, 178, 185, 218, 245, 247–8 democratization 16, 22, 178, 205, 207, 246 demonstration 101–2, 114, 126, 140–1, 155, 163–4, 182, 187, 199, 201, 204, 228, 232–4, 237 Denmark 78, 90, 101, 121, 172, 218, 221, 239; see also Danish Dera’a 65, 83, 117, 124, 152, 155, 161–2, 181, 186–7, 200, 213, 233 Derki, Talal 128–9, 226, 258 development 3–5, 11, 21, 23–4, 28, 30–1, 42, 44, 51, 55–6, 64, 67, 90, 95, 97, 110, 129, 144, 148, 172, 178, 183, 185, 207, 221–2, 232 Dibo, Mohammed 261 dictator 39, 43, 113, 162 dictatorial 3, 20, 51, 90, 107, 110, 125 dictatorial society 125 dictatorship 20–1, 37, 41–3, 49, 51, 76, 123, 163, 183, 185, 208–9 digital 2–5, 9, 11, 13–14, 16, 22, 25, 52, 55, 62, 79, 87, 90, 94, 111, 127, 137, 139, 144, 166–9, 173–5, 177–80, 188–90, 193, 197, 199, 207–9, 225, 231, 237, 240–4, 246–8 digital camera 127, 188, 193 digital platforms 168–9, 174 digital public sphere 168, 178 digital video 2–3, 5, 9, 11, 13–14, 16, 25, 52, 87, 139, 166–8, 173–5, 178–9, 189–90, 208–9, 225, 231, 237, 241, 243–4, 246 digital video activism 2–3, 5, 166–7, 246 digital video activists 13, 167 digitized memories 195 dignity 38, 53, 131, 199, 232 director 1, 5, 20, 29, 33, 37, 52–3, 56–9, 63, 68–73, 78, 84, 93, 98–100, 103, 112, 119, 123–5, 127–8, 135–6, 190, 192, 216, 228–30 displaced 6–7, 38, 46, 66, 86, 131–2, 139–40, 145, 150–1, 173, 194, 232, 235–7, 247 displaced people 6, 66, 131–2, 139, 145, 151, 232 displaced refugees 131, 150 displacement 12, 151

308

Index

dissident 9–13, 15, 17, 28, 58, 63, 79, 83, 92, 104–5, 107, 121, 123, 125–6, 217 dissent 10, 12–13, 16, 27, 64 dissidence 11–12, 17, 48, 60, 63, 104, 131 dissident art 9, 11, 13, 15, 17 distribution 11, 23, 25, 68, 86–7, 91, 95, 178, 192 documentary 1–7, 9, 11–12, 16–19, 21–31, 33, 35–7, 39–41, 43–9, 51–7, 59, 61– 5, 67–71, 73, 75, 77–83, 85–7, 89–91, 93–8, 100, 103–4, 107–11, 115, 117–21, 123–5, 127–9, 131–2, 134–9, 141–4, 154, 166–7, 169, 174–6, 179, 182–3, 186, 189–92, 198, 215, 226–9, 231–3, 236–8 documentary genre 12, 68; see also documentary; documentary film; feature-length documentary; independent documentary; short documentary; Syrian documentary documentation 64, 102, 166, 169, 174, 227, 231, 233, 242, 244–5 DOP 49, 62, 75–6, 93–5, 98, 119, 122; see also director of photography (DOP) Douma 71, 83–5, 153, 233 Dox Box Documentary Film Festival 4, 22; see also Dox Box; Dox Box Festival Dox Box Festival 11, 45, 136–139, 141; see also Dox Box; Dox Box Documentary Film Festival feature-length documentary 121, 136, 189 independent documentary 90, 135 International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) 129, 136; see also IDFA short documentary 30, 46, 111, 117, 141, 175, 186 Syrian documentary 2–6, 9, 12, 16–18, 21–3, 25–9, 31, 33, 35–7, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47–9, 51–3, 55–7, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85, 87, 93, 107, 124, 128, 143, 167, 179, 182– 3, 186, 189, 192, 215, 226, 228, 232 television documentary 103, 124 Dox Box 4, 11, 22, 45, 131, 136–42; see also Dox Box Documentary Film Festival; Dox Box Festival

drama 11–12, 49, 51, 70, 77–8, 93, 95, 98–100, 116, 125 drawings 118, 120, 245 drone technology 231, 240 Dubai 11, 60, 64, 136, 151 Dubai Film Festival 60, 136 Dubai International Film Festival 11 editor 22, 24, 30, 119, 122, 132 education 4, 21, 24, 33–4, 37, 64–5, 75, 81, 84, 90–1, 94–6, 117, 136–7, 146, 156, 167, 171, 197 Eesa, Hussam 261 Egypt 9, 12, 17, 23, 61, 117, 137, 140, 145, 153, 158, 167, 182, 186, 211, 224, 232 Egyptian 23, 61, 82–3, 117, 140, 145, 163, 180, 182, 224 Egyptian embassy 140, 145, 163 Egyptian revolution 117, 224 electricity 4, 66, 96, 113, 206 elite 4, 27, 66, 97, 169; see also elitist elitist 17, 40, 43, 48, 137–8; see also elite emergence 11, 17, 25, 90, 139, 164, 174, 178, 180 emergency 16, 173–5, 177, 179, 181, 183, 185, 187, 189, 191; see also emergency cinema emotional 15–16, 38–9, 52, 59–60, 74, 85, 127–9, 152, 176, 180–1, 185, 187, 196, 199, 201–2, 205, 207, 212, 237–9 empathic 13–14, 111; see also empathy; selective empathy empathy 13–16, 127, 180, 187, 189, 207, 209, 212, 231; see also empathic; selective empathy equipment 1, 25, 44, 76, 89, 95, 109, 184, 220 Erhaim, Zaina 194, 226, 261 essayist 60, 109, 117, 133, 190 ethnographic 2, 11, 35; see also ethnography ethnography 9, 241; see also ethnographic Euphrates 4, 30–2, 34–5, 39, 66; see also Euphrates Dam Euphrates Dam 30–2; see also Euphrates European 14, 24, 38, 63, 111–12, 118, 121, 127, 135, 171, 212, 225–6, 248 evidencing 5, 231, 233, 235, 237, 239, 241, 243–5, 247–8

Index exile 12, 24, 41, 56–62, 75, 89, 102, 123–4, 126, 130, 182, 190, 217, 229, 236–7; see also exiled exiled 24, 52, 113, 125–6; see also exile experimental 17, 22–4, 49, 51, 56, 89, 107, 109, 117–18, 162 expression 27, 30, 37, 54, 61, 169, 176, 180–1, 184, 200, 203, 206, 235, 247 extraordinary 176, 184–8, 196, 205, 208, 242, 244 extremist 154, 189, 204, 206, 210–11, 218, 227, 236, 243–4 Facebook 52, 102, 114, 148–9, 151, 157, 162–3, 168, 173, 178, 182, 184, 186, 188, 204, 221, 232, 234, 244, 247 Fahdah, Youssef 255 FAMU 63; see also Prague Film School (FAMU) Farah, Rami 47, 62, 87, 100, 103, 259 Faraj 71–4; see also Bayrakhdar, Faraj Fares, Raed 236 Farzat, Ali 62 Fatahi, Sara 87, 226, 260 Father Frans 138, 147, 158, 160; see also Abouna Francis; van der Lugt, Frans Father Paolo 111–15; see also Paolo; Dall'Oglio, Paolo Fayyad, Firas 134, 191, 226, 260 Fedda, Yasmin 75, 235–6 female 11, 16–17, 20, 36, 42, 56, 60, 62, 93–6, 103, 126, 135, 165, 176, 194 female cinematographer 62, 94–6, 194; see also female director(s); female film-maker(s); female video activist female director(s) 93, 103; see also female cinematographer; female film-maker(s); female video activist female film-maker(s) 11, 17, 56, 103, 135, 176; see also female cinematographer; female director(s); female video activist female video activist 165, 194; see also female cinematographer; female director(s); female film-maker(s) FEMIS 62, 91; see also La Fémis (Fondation Européenne pour les Métiers de l’Image et du Son)

309

festival(s) 3–4, 9–11, 18, 20, 22–5, 27, 31, 43, 45, 51–3, 55, 57, 60–1, 63, 67, 78, 86–7, 90, 94, 100, 103, 110, 120, 123, 127, 129, 131, 136–42, 175, 191, 230–2, 235–6 film 3–4, 11, 19, 22–3, 25–6, 28, 31, 52–3, 57, 60–3, 67, 75–6, 89–90, 94, 100, 103, 123, 127–9, 135–8, 161–2, 172, 175, 191, 230–2, 235, 250 Bergen International Film Festival 191 Cannes Film Festival 52–3, 55, 90 documentary film 4, 21–2, 61, 136; see also documentary; documentary genre; feature-length documentary; independent documentary; short documentary; Syrian documentary Doha Film Institute 11, 103, 138 film award(s) 31, 127, 135 international film festival 11, 23, 31, 57, 63, 191 Locarno Film Festival 127 National Film Organization (NFO) 76; see also NFO Nordisk Panorama Film Festival 191 Prague Film School (FAMU) 63; see also FAMU Sundance Film Festival 9, 129, 175, 191 First Lady Organised Non Governmental Organisation (FLONGO) 67, 138; see also FLONGO Fisk, Robert 215–17 FLONGO 67, 138; see also First Lady Organised Non Governmental Organisation (FLONGO) Foley, James 214, 221, 232 footage 32, 37–8, 45, 48, 52–3, 55–6, 58, 61, 68, 70, 80, 82, 92, 112, 118, 125, 129, 132–4, 141, 152, 161–2, 165, 184, 191, 198–9, 211–12, 215, 220– 2, 225, 229, 231, 233–5, 238–44, 246–8 foreign correspondents 213, 220; see also foreign reporters; foreign TV networks; international press foreign jihadi(s) 206, 215, 227 foreign reporters 215, 217; see also foreign correspondents; foreign TV networks; international press

310

Index

foreign TV networks 168; see also international press foundation 11, 36, 117, 129, 139, 141–2, 151, 194, 232, 236 France 21, 25–30, 46, 52, 55–9, 61–2, 89, 93–5, 101–2, 109, 119, 125–6, 135, 218, 226, 228, 232 France 24, 103, 119, 222; see also foreign correspondents; foreign reporters; foreign TV networks; international press Free Syrian Army (FSA) 76, 124, 152, 170, 188, 196, 206, 214, 232; see also FSA freedom 3, 6, 25–6, 34, 36, 39, 43, 54, 58, 61, 82, 86, 93, 99, 105–6, 111, 117–19, 124, 126, 128, 131, 133, 142, 144, 147, 152, 155, 160–4, 168, 174, 180, 184–5, 189, 197–9, 201, 206, 209, 223, 232, 235–9 Freedom Money Campaign 152 Freedom Song Girl 86, 238–9 freelance 140, 216, 220–1, 223 freelance war reporters 220 freelancers 137, 212, 215, 220–1 FSA 76, 85, 124, 128–9, 134–5, 152, 160, 162, 165–6, 170, 172, 188–9, 193, 196–8, 202, 204, 206, 213–14, 217– 18, 220, 222, 232, 234, 236, 243; see also Free Syrian Army (FSA) Fulbright scholarship 144, 151–2 funeral(s) 117, 143, 158, 167, 180, 184, 186–9, 197, 199, 201–2, 204, 217, 242 Gaziantep 70–1, 124, 170–2, 193, 198, 213, 215, 218, 220, 223, 232, 234–7 genre 12, 51, 62, 68, 94 Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) 25, 49, 54 Ghazi, Reem 259 Ghazzawi, Razan 145, 170 Golan Heights 46, 49, 100–1 Google maps 162–3 Gorani, Joude 62, 93–4, 127, 136, 259 government 4–7, 13, 20, 23–4, 28, 30–2, 39, 41, 47, 64–7, 69–70, 75–6, 90, 92, 94, 97, 100, 124, 128–9, 131–2, 135, 137–8, 151, 156, 159–60, 168–9, 171–2, 197, 200–2, 204, 213, 216–17, 220, 224, 228, 235, 247

grass-roots 22, 71, 212, 225 Gulf 38, 55, 70, 76 Gulf War 38 Haddad, Daed 59 Haddad, Ghiath 262 Hajjo, Allyth 259 Hakawati, Abdallah 237–40, 259 Hakki, Haytham 71, 257 Hama 3, 27, 59, 62, 98, 125, 141, 145, 161–2, 183, 231–2 Hama massacre 141, 183; see also Hama; massacre of Hama Hamada, Wael 261 Hamidiyyeh 125, 158, 232, 234 Hamwi, Azza 262 Hariri, Rafic 40, 47 Hassakah 6–7, 39, 112, 145, 151, 181–2, 194, 237 Hassan, Nidal 62, 87, 120–1, 258 Helou, Fares 101, 103, 122 heritage 59, 113, 136, 147 Hijazi, Bahraa 176, 261 historical 3, 17–18, 38, 54, 64, 78, 80, 84, 86, 174, 199, 211, 227, 246 Hollywood 9, 23, 224 homeland 24, 49, 58, 60, 110, 121, 124, 233 Homs 3, 52–3, 65, 79, 81, 98, 114, 128–9, 137–8, 144–5, 147, 152–63, 165, 167, 175, 189–90, 226, 228, 233; see also Homsi; al-Homsi, Ziad Homsi 83–5, 226, 261; see also Homs; al-Homsi, Ziad Honigmann, Heddy 1 humanitarian 7, 71, 111, 139, 150–1, 194, 203, 229–30, 245 humanitarian aid 203 humanitarian crisis 7, 139 humanitarian work 151 humanity 132, 147, 175, 224, 244 icon 28, 48, 57, 111, 113, 117; see also iconic iconic 14, 81, 167, 226; see also icon identity 9, 54, 126, 168, 180, 196, 200, 230 IDFA 9, 103, 119, 129, 136–7, 192; see also International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA)

Index IDHEC 26, 29; see also Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC) Idlib 130, 148–9, 171, 190, 227, 234–6 image politics 9, 168, 211 imagery 52–4, 71, 85, 113, 124–5, 190, 245 Imam, Omar 259 immersive journalism 238 imprisoned 28, 59, 72, 84–5, 96, 114, 143 imprisonment 62, 72, 159, 170 IMS 62, 90, 172, 221; see also International Media Support (IMS) incarcerated 28, 56, 84, 103; see also incarceration incarceration 72, 74, 80, 124, 141; see also incarcerated independence 23, 44, 48, 89 information 3, 16, 92, 97, 139, 173, 179, 185, 188, 195, 205, 213, 215–16, 224, 238, 248 innovation 9, 24, 144, 231; see also innovative innovative 4, 21, 43, 231, 240; see also innovation Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC) 26, 29; see also IDHEC interaction 83, 127, 180, 201–2, 212 international coalition 13, 189, 208–9, 220, 223–4 international press 213 internet 13, 16, 62, 100, 137, 140, 160, 163–4, 168, 178, 183–5, 193, 204–5, 222, 224; see also internet proxies internet proxies 168; see also internet Iran 13, 151, 208, 211 Iranian 11, 218 Iraq 38, 90, 218 Iraqi 22–3, 30, 139 Islam 42, 77–8, 114, 206, 211, 220 Islamic 21, 34, 69, 83, 116, 154, 159, 182, 186, 189, 197, 199, 206–7, 209, 218, 223, 244, 248 Islamic laws 154 Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) 13, 84, 113–15, 126, 188–9, 194, 199, 204, 206, 208, 210, 214–15, 218, 220, 224–5, 227, 236, 243 Islamist 42, 85, 160, 236 Ismaeli 118, 140, 193

311

Israel 24, 38, 45–7, 100 Israeli 24, 46, 55, 99–100, 183 Istanbul 84–5, 87, 158, 194 Jabhat al-Nusra 130, 160, 189, 218, 220, 227, 236, 243–4 Jamal Eddin, Saleh 262 Jarrah, Rami 169, 221 Jerf, Naji 124, 193, 259 Jerusalem 114–15 Jesuit 111–13, 147, 159–60 Jews 38 jihad 206; see also foreign jihadi(s); jihadi jihadi 130–1, 160, 206, 224, 227, 243–4; see also foreign jihadi(s); jihad Jordan 24, 62, 87, 100–1, 123–6, 158, 190 journalism 16, 178, 195, 238, 246, 248 journalist 48, 71, 78–9, 92, 103, 122, 124, 162, 169, 185, 193–4, 198, 202–3, 213, 215–17, 221, 227–8, 232, 244 justice 36, 38, 71, 98, 106, 111, 185, 187, 209, 229, 231, 237, 241, 245–6 injustice 24, 29, 34, 38, 71, 180 social justice 36, 111, 185, 187, 209, 246 Syria Justice and Accountability Centre (SJAC) 245–6 Transitional Justice (TJ) 241, 245; see also justice; social justice; Syria Justice and Accountability Centre (SJAC); TJ Kaadan, Soudade 135, 259 Kadi, Sam 192, 262 Kafr Nbel 190, 234–7 Kalthoum, Ziad 87, 98, 126–7, 226, 260 Kaprealian, Avo 87, 131, 226, 261 Karssli, Reem 262 Kassab, Yasser 261 Kawakibi 76–8 Khalifa, Khaled 95, 151 Khito, Amro 215, 232, 261 Kilis 171, 213, 223 Kingdom of Silence 80, 125, 166 Kobani 223 Kowatli, Walid 70, 257 Kurdish 15, 52, 65, 96, 126, 128–9, 182, 188, 218, 220, 223–4, 236 Kurdi, Alan 14; see also boy on the beach

312 Kurdish identity 126 Kurdistan 218 Kurds 96, 114 La Fémis (Fondation Européenne pour les Métiers de l’Image et du Son) 62, 91; see also FEMIS Latakia 2, 65–6, 71, 185 LCC 213, 216–17, 233; see also Local Coordination Committees (LCC) Lebanon 9, 17, 46–8, 56, 66, 87, 90, 99, 121, 123, 126, 132, 135, 150–2, 158, 161, 175, 211, 228, 234, 237 Lebanese 1, 29, 40, 47–8, 56, 61, 83, 134, 152 Lesbos 126, 190 liberated 70, 114, 141, 170, 190–1, 198–9, 213–14, 237 Libya 12, 218 Libyan 97, 140 Libyan embassy 97 Libyan revolution 140 Little Waterfall 4, 50, 66; see also Shallalah Saghirah Local Coordination Committees (LCC) 169, 184; see also LCC Majdal Shams 47, 100 Malas, Mohammed 4, 21, 26, 29, 37, 43–5, 48–9, 52, 54, 56, 69, 75, 77–9, 92–3, 98, 109, 115–16, 127, 155, 256 Maleh, Nabil 4, 6, 10–11, 21, 27, 63, 69–70, 75, 77–8, 155, 255 martyr 65, 202 martyred 202–3 massacre of Hama 125; see also Hama; Hama massacre Matar 139, 141, 151, 192, 231–3, 235, 237, 261 Matar, Amer 139, 141, 231, 233, 237, 261 Matar, Mezar 139, 232, 235, 237, 261 Matter, Ismael 262 McAllister, Sean 228–9 media 3, 5–6, 9, 11, 13–17, 30, 42–3, 62, 83, 87, 90, 92, 100, 103, 123–4, 129, 138–9, 144–5, 152, 154, 157, 159, 162–70, 172–5, 178, 183–5, 188, 191–2, 194–5, 198–9, 204–5, 207–8,

Index 210–17, 219–27, 229–32, 234, 236, 238, 240–4, 246–8 International Media Support (IMS) 62, 90, 172, 221 media attention 159, 212 media campaign 139, 232 media discrepancy 223 multimedia 101, 107 Nour Media Centre 204 Syrian media 14, 17, 92, 137, 144, 166, 172, 175, 213, 243 Union of Media Professionals 223 Western media 42–3, 208, 210, 217, 224–5, 227, 246 memories 31, 38, 55, 58–9, 76, 100, 111, 117–18, 125, 178, 180, 190, 195, 208–9, 237, 241 Midan 132, 155, 164, 190 Middle East and North Africa (MENA) 9, 11 militias 55, 179, 196, 204, 218 millennials 7, 137–8, 144, 176, 183 Ministry 6, 33, 35, 55, 66–7, 75–6, 97–9, 184–5, 213, 215–16 Ministry of Information (MOI) 97, 185, 213, 215–16 Miracle Baby video clip 205 mobile phone 22, 52–4, 70–1, 82, 127, 167, 175, 181, 184, 188, 190, 222, 225, 231–2, 234–5, 243 modernization 25, 31, 33, 35, 135 Mohammed, Hala 57, 71, 74–5, 257 Mohammed, Ossama 21, 26, 28–9, 43–5, 47–9, 52–6, 69, 75–6, 78–9, 91–3, 128, 136, 175, 226, 229, 257 monastery 111–14, 149, 160 moral outrage 16, 176, 196, 207–8, 241–2 Morocco 17, 218 Moscow 21, 25–6, 49, 54, 75, 90, 95 mosque 56, 113, 162, 213, 216 Moudallal, Sabri 55 movement 35, 100, 133, 136, 152, 177, 184, 190, 195, 200 movie 21, 44, 47, 64, 71–2, 142, 161, 179, 190 Mubarak 163, 182, 186 mukhabarat 81, 106, 119, 122, 139, 145, 151, 153, 164, 182, 228, 233–4

Index Muslim Brotherhood 81, 83, 182 Mwaylih 31, 33, 35–6 Namer, Guevara 136, 226, 260 narrative 4, 25, 43, 69, 134–5, 174, 180, 188, 190, 194, 208, 216, 221, 225 National Coalition Government 171; see also Syrian National Coalition (SNC) national television networks 168; see also television neighbourhood 19, 37, 96, 118, 122, 131– 2, 158, 160, 164–5, 171, 175, 181–2, 194, 202–4, 220–1, 233, 240–2 Netherlands 1, 135, 160, 218 newspaper 26, 90, 122, 218, 233 NFO 3, 19–26, 28, 30–1, 43–5, 55–6, 62–3, 68–9, 76, 78, 89–95, 97–9, 109, 116–17, 120, 122–3, 125, 136–7, 185; see also National Film Organization (NFO) Nihawi, Rami 260 non-violent resistance 176–7, 200 Nyrabia, Orwa 4, 11, 22, 136, 138, 141 occupation 24, 45–6, 48, 63, 100 opposition 9–10, 12, 42, 48, 70, 78, 82–4, 99, 113, 132, 141, 159–60, 167, 170, 172, 182, 194, 196–7, 202, 204, 207– 9, 214, 217–18, 220, 224, 227–8, 233, 243–4, 248 oppression 5–6, 12, 14, 20–1, 60, 66, 75, 80, 102, 107, 123, 125–6, 181, 198, 200, 225, 246, 248 organization 3, 16, 19, 22, 25, 41, 58, 62, 76, 86–7, 89, 94, 110, 123, 145, 163, 171–2, 174, 185, 203–4, 211, 221, 232 Orient 211, 224–5; see also orientalism; orientalist orientalism 195, 208, 211; see also Orient; orientalist orientalist 1, 53, 227; see also Orient; orientalism Oscar 192 Ottoman(s) 29, 36, 58, 61, 68 Page, Alexander 169; see also Rami; Jarrah, Rami Pakistan 40, 42–3, 151 Pakistani 41–2

313

Palestine 9, 23–4, 37, 45–7, 55, 63, 90, 170 Palestinian 23–4, 38, 45, 55, 99, 103, 128, 170, 229 Palestinian camp 128, 229 Palestinians 38, 55, 229 Palmyra 64–5, 71–4; see also Tadmor Paolo 111–15; see also Father Paolo; Dall'Oglio, Paolo paradox 10, 12, 20 Paris 2, 24, 26–7, 29, 52, 54, 56–9, 61–2, 71, 75, 79, 91–2, 94, 101, 103, 116, 125, 141, 208, 225, 232 peasant 31, 33–7, 39 perception 179–80, 209 performance 10, 61, 100–1, 110, 146, 178, 180, 195 photo 15, 96, 151, 195, 203, 214, 224, 239 director of photography (DOP) 93, 119; see also DOP photographer 14, 93, 134–5, 214, 246 photographs 93, 149, 160, 238, 246 photography 49, 93–4, 110, 119, 127, 138–40, 150, 230, 242, 245 pioneer 27, 128, 231, 238, 240; see also cinema pioneer pioneering 9, 44, 51, 240; see also cinema pioneer platform 4, 14, 22, 47, 56, 86–7, 90, 136, 138, 174, 178, 180, 184, 201, 203, 231, 235 playwright 30, 39, 43, 61, 71 poet 59, 71–2, 75, 91, 190; see also poetry poetry 39, 53–4, 59, 75, 93, 110, 115, 117, 121; see also poet president 47, 78–81, 91, 100, 110, 113, 134, 168, 187, 236, 248 priest 57, 72, 111–13, 147, 154, 159 prisoner 19, 59, 115, 118, 170, 206, 216–17, 228 prisons 60, 72, 74, 79, 84, 176, 206, 230 producer 11, 17, 47, 56, 95, 101, 119–20, 124, 135, 137, 239–40 production 3, 9–12, 16, 23, 25, 28, 43–4, 55–56, 63–4, 67–8, 75, 83–4, 86–7, 89–91, 101, 103, 118, 122, 130, 136–7, 144, 154, 156, 165, 178, 185, 190, 212, 221, 226, 234, 238, 241, 245 production company 56, 64, 68, 136–7

314

Index

video production 144, 154, 156, 165, 234; see also digital video; digital video activism; digital video activists; Miracle Baby video clip; video activism; video activist; videographer professionals 138–42, 144–5, 149, 151, 194, 212, 215, 221–3, 226, 244 propaganda 25, 127, 135, 166, 187, 207, 210, 215, 217, 224, 227 protagonist 20, 103–4, 107, 112, 151 protection 41–3, 51, 141, 176–7, 187, 194, 197, 200, 218, 246 protester(s) 12, 82, 102, 123–4, 129, 141, 155–6, 161–5, 168, 175, 181–4, 187– 8, 190, 197, 200, 206, 224, 232 publics 16, 207–8, 212, 224, 242 Quneitra 46–7, 54, 100, 116, 193 Ramadan 12, 193, 202 Rami 47, 62, 87, 100–3, 169, 221; see also Farah, Rami; Jarrah, Rami Raqqa 3, 5, 65–6, 70, 84, 103, 113–15, 182, 186, 189, 197–200, 202, 206, 220, 222–3, 225, 237 Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS) 114, 199, 225; see also RBSS RBSS 114, 199; see also Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS) reality 29, 37, 43, 45, 86, 101, 121, 139, 179–81, 198, 210, 212, 217, 221, 227, 231, 233, 235, 237, 239–41, 243–5, 247 rebel 85, 146, 149, 154, 160, 213, 243 recordings 44, 57, 85, 124, 139, 146, 150, 167, 180, 186, 200–1, 242–5 reform 26, 34–5, 67–8, 80, 183, 185, 204, 207 refugee 24, 54–5, 132, 136, 139, 190, 229, 238, 245 reporter 138, 198, 217, 221, 233; see also foreign reporters; freelance war reporters repression 7, 30, 48, 51, 61, 104, 125–6, 185, 197, 206, 241–2 resistance 3, 6, 13–14, 16, 18, 21–2, 24, 29, 37, 39, 56, 101, 104, 129, 168–9, 174, 176–7, 181, 190, 196–7, 200, 218, 223, 225, 231, 235, 241, 246

Reuters 221–2, 246 revolution 2–7, 10–14, 16–18, 20–2, 24, 26, 28–32, 34, 36–40, 42–4, 46–8, 50, 52–4, 56, 58, 60, 62–4, 66–8, 70, 72, 74–6, 78, 80–7, 90, 92, 94, 96–104, 106, 108, 110–14, 116–18, 120–2, 124, 126, 128–38, 140–6, 148, 150, 152–6, 158, 160, 162–4, 166–76, 178– 80, 182, 184–92, 194, 196, 198–200, 202, 204, 206–10, 212–14, 216, 218, 220, 222, 224–8, 230–8, 240, 242–4, 246, 248 revolutionary 3, 12–13, 23, 30–1, 34, 52–3, 82, 85, 101, 124, 129, 136, 141, 152, 157, 160, 163, 165–6, 175, 179, 189, 195, 197, 200–1, 204, 209, 218, 236–8, 242, 244 revolutionary song 124, 238 Syrian Revolution 2–3, 5–7, 11–13, 17, 21–2, 26, 29, 31, 42–3, 48, 53, 62–4, 67, 70, 75, 78, 81–6, 97–8, 101–4, 111, 113, 117, 120–1, 124, 128–9, 132, 134–6, 140–1, 143–5, 152, 155, 160, 162–3, 166–9, 173–5, 179, 184– 7, 189–92, 194, 200, 206–9, 224–8, 231–2, 235, 237, 242–3 Syrian revolutionaries 60–1, 168, 218, 223 Riyad 91–2, 196 rural areas 6–7, 18, 31–2, 37, 65 Russia 13, 75–6, 94, 165, 177, 208 Russian 19, 77, 95, 124, 177, 179, 194, 208, 218, 235, 24 SAA 196, 218; see also Syrian Arab Army (SAA) Said, Niras 229–30 Salameh, Samer 262 Salamiyyeh 118, 122, 125, 161 Saleh 71–2, 83–6, 103, 209, 217 SAR 23; see also Syrian Arab Republic (SAR) satellite 11, 168, 185, 245 Saudi 19, 114–15, 218 Saydnaya 149, 175 scene 10, 17, 20, 24–6, 30–6, 41, 44, 49–50, 58–60, 64–5, 69, 81, 85, 92, 96–7, 101–6, 112–13, 116–17, 130, 133, 140, 164, 182, 203, 205, 238

Index scholarship 9, 17, 25, 62, 75, 90, 93–5, 140, 144–5, 151–2 Screen Institute Beirut 4, 62 secret police 69, 71, 73, 102, 106, 133, 135, 159, 217, 233–4 sectarian 67, 140, 152–3 secular 2, 155, 158, 208, 220, 236, 244, 247–8 security 51, 73, 80–1, 87, 105, 124, 129, 133, 164–5, 169–70, 175, 181, 183–4, 186–7, 194, 196–7, 201, 220, 224, 230, 232, 246 selective empathy 15, 187, 207, 212 self-immolation 181 Sha’aban, Buthaina 215 shabihha 159, 243 Shadid, Anthony 214 Shahbandar, Nazih 27, 43–5, 52, 107–8, 128, 231, 240, 256–7 Shallalah Saghirah 31–3; see also Little Waterfall Shehadeh, Bassel 5, 61, 142–5, 147, 149, 151–3, 155, 157, 159, 161, 163, 165– 7, 173, 182, 237, 260 Sheikh Khudr, Ali 261 shelling 128, 163, 165–6, 171, 193, 197, 199, 237 shots 20–1, 39–40, 50–1, 65, 72–4, 91, 109, 112, 134, 191, 204, 240 siege 106, 124, 129, 134, 158–9, 165, 190, 194, 217–18, 222, 225, 229–30, 237 Sinjab, Lina 95, 138, 233 Skype 81–3, 100, 163, 171, 173, 229, 236 SNHR 176; see also Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) social market economy 67, 138 socialist 2, 4, 23–4, 34, 37, 43, 63, 78, 248 solidarity 24, 53–4, 141, 156, 161, 169, 189, 196, 205, 207, 231 souq 96, 125, 232, 234 Souq Hamidiyyeh 125, 232, 234 Soviet Union 25, 75–6, 90, 126 spectator 107, 109, 115–16, 123, 125–9, 141 spectatorship 13, 212 stories 2, 6, 24, 31, 37, 54, 58, 63–5, 67, 72–4, 85, 94, 96, 104, 110, 119, 121, 123–4, 126, 129–30, 135, 154, 161, 175–6, 180, 199, 221, 224, 231, 234–5

315

storytelling 2, 30, 35, 135 Street Foundation 139, 141–2, 194; see also al-Share3 street protests 5, 13, 64, 82, 152, 176, 186, 198, 200–2, 204, 242 streets 1, 5, 12, 52, 68, 82, 92, 98, 101, 156, 165, 173, 181–6, 188, 197, 200–1, 204, 222 students 11, 18, 27, 33, 39, 46, 50, 65, 75, 151, 155, 221 Sweden 20, 63, 67, 135, 144, 171 Swedish 144–5, 218 Syria 1–6, 9–32, 34–54, 56–64, 66–76, 78–82, 84–7, 89–104, 106–14, 116–42, 144–52, 154, 156–90, 192–6, 198–202, 204–18, 220–48 Syrian 1–7, 9–33, 35–73, 75–87, 89–95, 97–107, 109–13, 115–18, 120–1, 123–47, 149, 151–3, 155, 157–201, 205–38, 240–8 Syrian Archive 248 Syrian Communist Party 79–80 Syrian countryside 32, 64, 67, 125 Syrian government 5, 28, 31, 47, 66, 69, 75, 90, 94, 100, 129, 135, 137–8, 151, 159–60, 213, 217, 220, 224, 235, 247 Syrian Mobile Phone Film Festival 22, 231, 235 Syrian National Coalition (SNC) 218; see also National Coalition Government Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) 176 Syrian refugees 126, 171, 207 Syrian TV 11–12, 70 Syrian war 3, 12, 14, 53–4, 70, 129, 131, 133, 158, 167, 207–8, 210, 212–14, 217–19, 227, 246 Tadmor 64, 71–3; see also Palmyra Tanjour, Alfoz 64, 78, 122–4, 226, 258 Tartous 35, 37, 59, 66 technology 11, 22, 25, 33, 44, 90, 94, 113, 137, 175, 178, 231, 234, 238, 240–1, 246, 248 television 29–30, 40, 47, 55, 63, 78, 90, 97, 100, 103, 112, 116, 123–4, 128, 137– 8, 141, 168, 181, 185, 187, 211, 225,

316

Index

244; see also foreign TV networks; Syrian TV; TV terrorist 41, 187, 194–5, 207, 225, 243 testimonial 14, 197, 205, 209 testimony 161, 203 theatre 19, 27, 44, 70, 72–3, 75, 86, 97, 101, 124, 128, 131–2, 180, 205 TJ 241, 245–8; see also Transitional Justice (TJ) torture 52, 72, 74–5, 81, 83, 96, 106, 116, 153, 184, 186–8, 190, 194, 204, 230, 235, 243, 246; see also tortured tortured 14, 132, 159, 164, 166, 176, 186, 199, 206; see also torture Touma, Issa 93, 134–5 Tunisia 12, 16, 61, 117, 119, 140, 145, 153, 224, 232 Turkey 13, 70, 82, 84–5, 123–4, 128, 150–1, 158, 170–2, 190, 193–5, 198–9, 213–14, 218, 220, 228, 232, 234–6 Turkish 14, 70, 85, 171, 193, 198, 213, 223, 232, 236 TV 11–12, 16, 37, 70, 86, 101, 161–2, 168, 173, 216, 232, 243; see also foreign TV networks; Syrian TV; television twitter 15, 163, 169–70, 173, 184, 221, 232, 244, 247 UGC 16, 178, 241, 243–8 UN 3, 7, 159, 165, 171, 245; see also United Nations (UN) UNDP 140, 148, 158; see also United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) UNICEF 95; see also United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) United Nations (UN) 46, 148, 165; see also UN; UNDP; UNICEF United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) 140, 148, 158; see also UNDP United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) 95; see also UNICEF United States (US) 13, 38, 144–145, 151–2, 156, 161; see also US

uprising(s) 3, 12, 67, 137, 139, 161, 167–9, 200, 213–14, 230, 246; see also Arab Spring; Arab Uprisings US 10, 13, 16, 19, 25, 27–28, 36, 38, 42, 55, 58–59, 62, 66, 68, 71, 75–76, 86–87, 90, 93, 95, 104–105, 113, 119, 132, 138–139, 145, 150, 155, 158–159, 165, 170, 175, 179–180, 182–183, 190, 193, 195, 198, 200–201, 206– 207, 209, 212, 214–216, 222, 228, 238, 247; see also United States (US) User Generated Content (UGC) 16, 178 van der Lugt, Frans 147, 159; see also Abouna Francis; Father Frans VDC 233, 245; see also Violations Documentation Center (VDC) Verhoeven, Paul 115–116 Vertov, Dziga 179 VGIK 25, 49, 54, 77, 95; see also Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) video activism 2–6, 9–10, 12, 14, 16–18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44, 46, 48, 50, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60, 62, 64, 66, 68, 70, 72, 74, 76, 78, 80, 82, 84, 86, 90, 92, 94, 96, 98, 100, 102, 104, 106, 108, 110, 112, 114, 116, 118, 120, 122, 124, 126, 128, 130, 132, 134, 136, 138, 140, 142, 144, 146, 148, 150, 152, 154, 156, 158, 160, 162, 164, 166–8, 170, 172, 174, 176, 178, 180, 182, 184, 186, 188–190, 192–212, 214, 216, 218, 220, 222, 224, 226, 228, 230, 232, 234, 236, 238, 240–2, 244, 246, 248; see also digital video; digital video activism; digital video activists; Miracle Baby video clip; video activist; video production; videographer video activist 114, 165–7, 173, 175, 186, 192–4, 198–200, 206, 213, 221–2, 229, 231, 247; see also digital video; digital video activism; digital video activists; Miracle Baby video clip; video activism; video production; videographer videographer 181; see also video activism; video activist; video production

Index vigil 97, 140, 163, 182 Vimeo 174 Violations Documentation Center (VDC) 233; see also VDC violence 13–15, 49, 51–3, 60, 85–6, 101, 106, 121, 129–31, 150, 154–6, 161–2, 168, 174, 176–8, 184–90, 192, 196, 201, 204, 207–9, 227, 234, 241–4, 246, 248 domestic violence 49, 106, 131, 150 structural violence 60, 130–1 Virtual Reality (VR) 231, 233, 235, 237, 239–41, 243, 245, 247; see also VR Visions du Réel 127, 192 VR 231, 238–9; see also Virtual Reality (VR) Wadha, Laura 262 Wall of Fear 162, 180–1, 188, 190, 199–201; see also demonstration; protester(s); street protests Wannous, Saadallah 30, 36–7, 43 war crimes 5, 14, 206, 210, 231, 241–7, 249; see also crimes Ward, Hanna 21, 40, 47, 49, 75–6, 122, 256 weapon 16, 71, 84, 128, 154, 167, 176–7, 246 Whatsapp 163, 173 White Helmets 191, 205

317

women 2, 17, 32–5, 41–2, 55–7, 60, 65, 74, 84, 121, 124, 126, 130, 141, 156, 176, 182, 186, 194, 206, 216, 226 worldwide 10, 12, 14, 27–8, 141, 159, 176, 205, 229, 238, 247 Yarmouk 128, 228–30 Yazbek, Samar 62 Yazji, Liwaa 259 Yekîneyên Parastina Gel (YPG) 218; see also YPG Yemen 12, 30 young urban professionals 140, 145, 149 YouTube 5, 14, 16, 64, 82, 85, 142, 159, 161, 164, 168, 173–5, 177–81, 183–9, 191, 193, 195–6, 198–201, 205–9, 216, 221, 223, 231–4, 238, 240–3, 245, 247–8 YPG 218, 223; see also Yekîneyên Parastina Gel (YPG) Zabadani 141, 190, 213, 232–234, 236–237 Zaitouneh, Razan 84, 161, 233 Zbib, Firas 262 Ziad 83–85, 87, 98, 126–127, 151, 226 Zikra, Samir 4, 10, 21, 26, 54, 75, 77–78, 92, 116, 256 Zytoon, Obaidah 190, 226, 259

Index of Films 194. Us, Children of the Camp (2017) 262 27meters (2013) 260 300 Miles (2016) 87, 261 5 Seasons of Revolution (working title) 138, 260 9 Days – From My Window in Aleppo (2015) 134 A Bedouin Day (1981) 255 A Bedouin Portrait (2007) 255 A Comedian in a Syrian Tragedy (working title) 101, 259 A Day and a Button (2015) 262 A Dream of a Small City (1970) 256 A Dream of Powerful Monsters (2014) 259 A Farewell to Damascus (2013) 262 A Flood in Baath Country (2003) 256 A Home on a Rainbow, about the Ongoing Syrian Exodus (2015) 260 A Little Sun (2007) 78, 122–3, 125, 256, 258 A Memory in Khaki (2016) 78, 125, 226, 258 A Memory of Forgetfullness (2011) (short) 260 A Murder Case (2003) 255 A Plate of Sardines (1997) 45–7, 256 A Scent of Paradise (1982) 256 A Silent Cinema (2001) 91, 258 A Syrian Lovestory (2015) 228 Abortion of the Soul (2013) 259, 261 About Her (1982) 257 Al Baroudi (2004) 255 Alabdalla (2008) 258 Aleppo (1965) 255 Aleppo, Maqams for Pleasure (1998) 256 Art of Surviving (2013) 262 As If We Were Catching a Cobra (2012) 61 Aspirin and a Bullet (2011) 89, 91, 258 Azadi (2011) 129, 258

Bedouin World (1994) 255 Before Vanishing (2005) 94, 259, 276 Behind the White Colour (2015) 260 Being Good So Far Part 1 (2014) 261 Being Good So Far Part 2 (2014) 261 Beyond Bars (2007) 255 Beyond the City's Walls (2014) 258 Black Stone (2006) 259 Bleu Gris (2004) 257 Blue (2014) 260 Boulevard Al Assad (2002) 111, 258 By the Sea 258 Captain Diaa (2017) 262 Carrying Eid to Camps (2010) 173, 260 Chaos (working title) 260 Chiaroscuro (1948) 44 Chiaroscuro (1990) 256 Chickens (1977) 30, 256 Citizen Journalist (2016) 262 City of Emptiness (2008) 261 City of Ghosts (2017) 261 Clapper Father Paolo Dall'oglio: The ‘Icon’ Of the Syrian Revolution (2003) 111–13, 258 Cola Bridge (2009) 258 Colour and Life (1965) 255 Coma (2015) 87, 226, 260 Contrejour (2007) 255 Cow Farm (2016) 261 Da'esh in Aleppo (2015) 124, 193, 259 Damascene Bouquet (2008) 255 Damascene Secrets (2008) 255 Damascus Roofs Tales of Paradise (2010) 259 Damascus Symphony of a City (2009) 258 Damascus, My First Kiss (2013) 259 Damascus, the Family (2007) 255 Death of Aleppo (2016) 78, 124, 226, 258 Demain L'adieu (2012) 261 Divorce and Marriage (2005) 257



Index of Films

Documentaries Jeddah (1966) 255 Dolls: A Woman from Damascus (2007) 136, 258–9 Dream (1987) 55, 256 Dreams of the City (1984) 54, 256

Ibrahim (2015) 260 Illegal Dream (2017) 262

East of Eden (1988) 256 Eternally Aliens (2002) 260 Every Day, Every Day (2013) 262 Everyday Life in a Syrian Village (1974) 4, 30, 37–9, 92, 256

Kaleidoscope (2015) 258

False Alarm (2014) 237, 259, 261, 287 Family – Children (2006) 255 Far from the Homeland (1969) 24, 257 Faraway So Close from Borderline (2014) 258 Farouk, Besieged Like Me (2017) 257 Features of Damascus (2008) 257 Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam (1970) 30 Flight (2017) 262 Flint Mountains (2009) 258 Foam (Zabad) (2006) 103–5, 107, 259 For a Little Piece of Cake (2005) 257 For the Attention of Madame the Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto (1990) 40, 256 Fragments of the Revolution (2015) 257 From 8 to 10 (2007) 255 From My Syrian Room (2014) 226, 259 Frontline (2015) 262 Haunted (2014) 99, 258–9 Heaven before Her Time (2007) 255 Hero of the Sea (2010) 258 Hey, Don't Forget the Cumin (2008) 61, 257 Home (2015) 99, 226, 259, 261 Homeland of Barbed Wire (1980) 257 Homs, I Will Stay (2012) 262 Houses without Doors (2016) 87, 132, 134, 226, 261 I am the one who Carries Flowers to Her Grave 57, 109, 115, 258 I Dream of My Home (2009) 150, 260 I Will Cross Tomorrow (2012) 162, 260 Ibn al Am (2001) 79, 257 Ibn al Am – online (2012) 79, 82, 257, 259

319

Journey into Memory (2006) 257, 277 Just a City (2003) 260

La Dolce Siria (2014) 258 Ladder to Damascus (2013) 127, 259 Lajat (2012) 129 Land for a Stranger (1998) 76, 256–7 Last Men in Aleppo (2017) 191, 226, 261 Letters from Yarmouk (2014) 229–30 Letters to S. (2015) 260 Light and Shadows, the Last of the Pioneers: Nazih Shahbandar (1994) 43, 45 Light Harvest (1996) 110, 258, 276, 291 Little Gandhi (2016) 262 Looking for Pink (2009) 135, 259 Love Aborted (1983) 256 Love during Siege, Diaries of a Family in the Besieged Southern Damascus (2015) 262 Mecca (1967) 255 Merry Christmas Homs (2012) 162, 260 Moaning (2011) 259 Morning fears, Night Chants (2012) 136, 226, 258 Moudaress (1996) 256–7 My Ear Can See (2002) 258 My School (Abou Naddara) 261 Near to Kobani (2018) 258 No Jihad in Here (working title) 261 Nostalgia (1998) 260 Nour al Houda (2010) 259 Nour wa Thilal/Light and Darkness (1948) 255 Obscure (2017) 136, 259 Odes to Lesvos (2016) 259 Of Father and Sons (2017) 130, 259 Of God and Dogs (2014) 257 Oh My Heart (2009) 126, 260 On a Day of Ordinary Violence, My Friend Michel Seurat . . . (1996) 256

320

Index of Films

On a Revolution (1978) 256 On Revolution (2017) 175, 257 On Screen Off Record (working title) 103, 259 On the Edge of Life (2017) 261 On the Other Side (2011) 260 One Day in Aleppo (2017) 192, 261 Ordinary Zionism (1974) 257 Our Hands (Aydina) (1982) 257 Our Terrible Country (2014) 78–9, 84–5, 99, 226, 257, 261 Paradise Radio (working title) 261 Passion (2005) 256 Playground from Hell (2013) 260 Point (2004) 259 Portrait from Kamishli (2007) 255 Quneitra 74 (1974) 256 Reading Workshop (2010) 150–1, 260 Republic of Silence (2018) 258 Return to Homs (2013) 128–9, 137, 189, 226, 259, 261 Revenging for the Astronaut (2007) 260 Salty Skin (2003) 258 Samia (2008) 258 Saturday Morning Gift (2010) 151, 260 Silence (2006) 47, 100–1, 259 Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait (2014) 52, 129, 137, 175, 189, 226, 229, 262, 272, 292 Singing to Freedom (2012) 61, 160–1, 260 Six Ordinary Stories (2007) 258 Skin (2016) 261 Smuggling 23 Minutes of Revolution (2011) 232, 261 Songs from a Secret Floor (2006) 260 Spring (2008) 260 Step by Step (1978) 49, 51–2, 76, 256–7 Still Recording (2018) 262 Stone Bird (2006) 259 Street Music (2013) 261 Streets of Freedom (2013) 161, 260 Syria: The Battle Beyond (2014) 78, 123, 226, 258 Syria’s Rebellious Women (2015) 194, 226, 261

Syrialism (2017) 259 Syrian Children Rise to Heavens (2014) 70, 257 Syrian Eyes of the World (2018) 261 Tahta Sama' Dimashq/Under the Damascus Sky (1932) 255 Taste of Cement (2017) 87, 226, 260 Testimony of Palestinian Children in Wartime (1972) 257 The Beginnings of Syria in Cinema (1964) 255 The Bright Darkness (2002) 255 The Child Who Doesn't Cry (Abou Naddara) 261 The Circle (1978) 255 The Club of the Future (2006) 258 The Doll in Her Hands (2007) 255 The Extras (1993) 21, 25, 68, 75, 255 The Game of Eternity (1971) 255 The Holy Crystal (2008) 68–9, 255 The Immortal Sergeant (2014) 98, 127–8, 226, 260 The Intimate Enemy (1986) 256 The Lady of Shibam (1988) 256 The Man with the Golden Soles (1999) 40, 47–8, 256 The Master (1995) 256 The Memory (1977) 256 The Misfortunes of Some . . . (1981) 256 The Most Pretty Dudes (2016) 261 The Murder Club (2002) 255 The Night (1992) 256 The Play (1979) 257 The Pot (2005) 258 The Right Side of the Road (2004) 118, 259 The River of Gold (2002) 111, 258 The Road to Damascus (2006) 63–4, 255 The Rocks (1977) 255 The School (1978) 255 The Sea Belongs to Mariam (working title) 261 The Sea, our Western Front (1975) 256 The Sun’s Incubator (2011) 117, 186, 258 The Syrian War Zone Kids That Have Lost Their Innocence (2012) 260 The Visit (1970) 24, 257 The War Show (2016) 190, 226, 259, 261 The Waste Land (2018) 259



Index of Films

The Witness (1986) 257 The Witnesses (1974) 256 There Are So Many Things Still to Say (1997) 37–8, 256 They Were Here (2000) 110, 258 To Be Continued (2016) 262 Today and Everyday (1981) 257 Tomorrow's Memories (2007) 255 True Stories of Love, Life, Death and Sometimes Revolution (2012) 121, 258 Two Cities and a Prison (2008) 135, 259 Under the Tank (2014) 261 United in Exile (2011) 255 Untold Stories (2013) 260 Venice 70: Future Reloaded (2013) 257 Video on Sand (1984) 256

321

Waiting for Abu Zaid (2010) 257 Waiting for the Day (2004) 258 Water (2010) 255 We Will Not Forget (1974) 256 When I Color My Fish (2002) 258 When Qasiyun Grows Tired (2006) 257 While My Soul Is Unmindful (2009) 259 Why Do We Film Ourselves Now? (2015) 262 Windows of the Soul (2011) 259 Wishes (Umniyat) (1983) 257 With Soul, With Blood (1971) 24, 257 Wooden Rifle (2013) 258 Yamo (2011) 260 Yolla, Un retour vers soi (2008) 257