Documentary shows human side of war in Syria
BEIRUT — It has been 18 months since the body of three-year old Aylan Kurdi washed up on the shore of Turkey, the premature end of a flight from Syria.
Nilufer Demir’s photo of Kurdi, 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 premières at 10 p.m. Monday on HBO, can revive our collective sympathy.
“I tried to show the human side of these people, and their dignity,” he said in an interview from Los Angeles.
“Their dignity is the essential thing.”
Its HBO première 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 at more than 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 uprising that spiralled into war.
The historical context given is thin, but in broad strokes, is 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 expose of the crackdown that sparked the still-raging war.
A lot of the footage is graphic, and will be unfamiliar to those who have not followed Syria closely. Viewers will gaze on 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.
“Without this brutality, you won’t understand why these people are looking for shelter, why they take the boats and head for the seas,” said Afineevsky, whose 2015 Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary. “You want to feel the same thing that mothers feel, to lose their kids.”
At its core, Cries For Syria is unsparing. But whether it will move American and European viewers to rethink their posture toward refugees is anyone’s guess. History suggests that feelings of collective generosity are ephemeral.