IMAGE VIA UNSPLASH BY CHRIS MURRAY

Olive oil, cumin seeds, juniper berries, barley and cotton; Syria’s biggest exports, yet in the last decade it has been the country’s war documentaries which have shaken up the global consumer market.

Stories of disaster, tragedy, and horror; the Syrian Civil War’s legacy and the stories which had triggered the Syrian documentary film phenomena taking world cinema by storm, where in 2014 alone, 14 feature documentaries were produced by Syrians and/or in Syria. In the last decade Syrians have been making appearances at the most prestigious film festivals and ceremonies from Cannes to the Oscars, whilst winning prizes at Sundance and the BAFTAs. This unprecedented success, however, can lead us to become sceptical as to whether Syrian cinema is in fact experiencing a renaissance or rather, we are witnessing merely an ephemeral wave dependent on the exploitation of war, and the box office draw which it infamously has.

Exploitation in Cinema

In the United States, minority groups such as Italian and Jewish Americans have found great success in the long term, by exploiting both the underworlds and atrocities connected to their people’s history, such as organised crime in New York and genocide in Europe. The likes of Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg have solidified themselves as some of the most influential and important artists of the 20th century through such exploitation in films like Goodfellas and Schindler’s List. Will the next generation of Syrian filmmakers be beholden to similar success or is the economic and social destabilisation of the region an impassable roadblock in the way of prosperity?

Before the war

Starting with the rule of the Ba’ath Party, and consequently the Assad family in the 1960s, the Syrian film industry had been monopolised under the National Organisation for Cinema (NOC), a department of the Ministry of Culture. As there have never been any film schools in Syria, it was often wealthy Syrians who were trained outside of the country in Europe and North America, who were granted funds by the NOC to produce films. Although Syria never became a powerhouse in filmmaking relative to their Arab neighbours in Lebanon and Egypt, there have been a handful of Syrians who have been solidified as legends of Arab filmmaking such as Mohammad Malas during the 80s and 90s, however, their films never saw significant recognition beyond the region.

With the emergence of accessible high-definition video cameras in the 2000s, Syrian filmmakers were beginning to be able to produce films without the involvement of the NOC, which had become more stringent in their censorship. The technological revolution in the 21st century was now to lay the groundwork for the documentary boom in the 2010s.

Returning Home

The first of the post-2011 documentaries to gain notable recognition was Talal Derki’s Return to Homs (2013). The two protagonists of the film are Abdul Basset Saroot, a talented goalkeeper who redirects his life towards revolution and resistance, and Derki himself who in his return to Syria feels alien in his own home, and questions both sides of the conflict as he sees no positive outcome and only destruction. Derki’s “front-line” footage, experimental editing style and the unresolved ending have received much praise from critics, even within his directing style compared to that of Stanley Kubrick.

IMAGE VIA UNSPLASH BY MIRKO FABIAN

Mass Appeal

In The White Helmets (2016), although produced by British filmmakers, the subjects are the Syrian emergency volunteers under the organisation of the same name. In part due to its accessibility to American and European audiences, featuring a soundtrack including then-unreleased Gorillaz song “Plastic Beach”, the film won Best Documentary (Short Subject) at the Academy Awards. The film, although featuring scenes of horrific violence and injuries, does however provide a more hopeful sentiment, as the film acts almost as a promotional tool for the White Helmets non-profit.

In the film Silvered Water, Syria Self Portrait (2014) the civil war is portrayed through the camera phones of “1,001” Syrians, some of whom are military defectors, and some who have shot the most sobering and awe-inspiring footage from the war. This Cannes nominated film brings forward a new form of decentralised storytelling, where the editors are both veteran filmmakers, Ossama Mohammed and Wiam Bedirxan and the internet algorithms which brought forth the videos to the public. The directors blur the lines between journalism and art, repackaging the bloody scenes of torture and violence into more digestible stories with humanity at their core. Despite its pessimistic tone, the film can provide the many silent, unheard victims of war some hope; perhaps only a mobile phone could be the thing stopping one from having a voice.

Looking ahead

For our entire lives, we are searching for identity; we are searching for our place amongst the crowd. Attaching ourselves to the stories which move us and use them to find direction. But can all stories give you that direction? In the story assigned to you, there are no streets to walk along, no cities to navigate through; an agitated crowd shoves you down onto the rubble formed from the bricks of your once home where your once family lived. This is the reality for thousands of Syrians in the aftermath of the Civil War, with a country destroyed, entire communities massacred, and livelihoods dissipated. 

To Syrians: What must be done? If you can no longer buy into their stories, it might just be worth selling your own.

For more coverage of Western Asia, read our 2020 article on the Lebanese crisis.