Doc looks at Syria’s bloody civil war

Cries From Syria Monday, HBO

BEIRUT It has been 18 months since the body of three-year old Aylan Kurdi washed up on the shore in Turkey, the premature end of an escape from Syria.

Nilufer Demir’s photo of the toddler, face down in the morning surf, prompted an outpouring of compassion for refugees around Europe and North America.

Now, voters in developed countries are rewarding candidates for smearing refugee resettlement as a cultural and security threat, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Director Evgeny Afineevsky hopes his new documentary, Cries From Syria, which premieres Monday on HBO, can revive our collective sympathy.

“I tried to show the human side of these people and their dignity,” he said. “Their dignity is the essential thing.”

Its HBO premiere and limited run in Los Angeles and New York movie theatres falls on nearly the sixth anniversary of Syria’s murderous war, one so brutish the UN has lost count of the death toll. Most estimates put it over 400,000. The government is responsible for the bulk of those fatalities.

Cries From Syria is a difficult film that opens with a shot of little Aylan’s body before rewinding to the popular uprising that spiralled into war.

The historical context given is thin, but factually correct. The Assad family had ruled Syria with an iron fist for four decades, and cracked down on dissent with militaristic violence. However, those hoping for an in-depth history lesson on how President Bashar Assad managed to maintain an indissoluble core of support within the state’s various security apparatuses and the air force will need to look elsewhere.

Stitching together footage recorded by activists of the events in Syria with moving interviews from people who can only be described as survivors of Assad’s desperation to rule, Afineevsky delivers a wrenching exposé of the crackdown that sparked the still-raging war.

A lot of the footage is graphic and will be unfamiliar to those who haven’t followed Syria closely.

Viewers will see the disfigured corpse of a dead 13-year-old who, by opposition accounts, was kidnapped and tortured to death by the government’s security services in 2011 to make an example out of protesters. Individual cases are difficult to verify, but prosecutors and human-rights watchdogs have accumulated evidence pointing to an industrial scale of torture and extrajudicial killings in the government’s shadowy network of detention centres. They have collected evidence of war crimes by the conflict’s other parties, too, though on a smaller scale.

The film moves through the phases of the war, ending with a chapter called In Between that returns to the desperate attempts to flee.