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PEOPLE & ARTSThursday 9 March 2017
‘Cries From Syria’ is an unsparing, must-see documentary
PHILIP ISSA countries are rewarding
Associated Press candidates for smearing
BEIRUT (AP) — It has been refugee resettlement as a
18 months since the body cultural and security threat,
of 3-year old Aylan Kurdi despite the overwhelming
washed up on the shore of evidence to the contrary.
Turkey, the premature end Director Evgeny Afineevsky
of a flight from Syria. hopes his new documen-
Nilüfer Demir’s photo of tary, “Cries From Syria,”
Kurdi, face down in the which premieres at 10 p.m.
morning surf, prompted an EST Monday on HBO, can
outpouring of compassion revive our collective sym-
for refugees around Europe pathy.
and North America. “I tried to show the human
Now, voters in developed side of these people, and
This image released by HBO shows a scene from the documentary, “Cries From Syria,” premiering
March 13, on HBO.
their dignity,” he said in an
interview from Los Angeles.
“Their dignity is the essential miliar to those who have
thing.”
Its HBO premiere and lim-
ited run in Los Angeles and
New York movie theaters
falls on nearly on the sixth
anniversary of Syria’s mur-
derous war, one so brutish,
the U.N. has lost count of
the death toll. Most esti-
mates put it over 400,000.
The government is respon-
sible for the bulk of those
fatalities.
“Cries From Syria” is a diffi-
cult film that opens with a
shot of little Aylan’s body
before rewinding to the
popular uprising that spi-
raled into war.
The historical context given
is thin, but in broad strokes,
is factually correct. The
Assad family had ruled Syr-
ia with an iron fist for four
decades, and cracked
down on dissent with mili-
taristic 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 se-
curity apparatuses and the
air force will need to look
elsewhere.
Stitching together footage
recorded by activists of the
events in Syria with mov-
ing interviews from people
who can only be described
as survivors of Assad’s des-
peration to rule, Afineevsky
delivers a wrenching ex-
pose of the crackdown
that sparked the still-raging
war.
A lot of the footage is
graphic, and will be unfa-
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 the take
the boats and head for
the seas,” said Afineevsky,
whose 2015 “Winter on Fire:
Ukraine’s Fight for Free-
dom” was nominated for
an Oscar for best docu-
mentary. “You want to feel
the same thing that moth-
ers feel, to lose their kids.” mantic terms, tells viewers
Individual cases are difficult she doesn’t know what she
to verify, but prosecutors
and human rights watch-
dogs have accumulated
reams of evidence point-
ing to an industrial scale
of torture and extrajudicial
killings in the government’s
shadowy network of de-
tention centers. They have
collected evidence of war
crimes by the conflicts oth-
er parties, too, though at 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 the war. One of them,
of course, belongs to Kur-
di’s family. The U.N.’s refu-
gee agency says 5 million
Syrians — nearly one-quar-
Associated Press
ter of the country’s pre-war
population — are refugees.
Once citizens, with jobs,
belongings, homes, access
to education and health
care, they are now mired
in the camps and the ghet-
tos of Syria’s neighbors.
They are stateless, and they
need onward passage to
rich, developed nations, for
the sake of their children’s
futures if for nothing else.
But the nature of the sub-
ject matter means the film
will doubtless raise other
questions, as well, chief
among them: What could
the U.S. and Europe have
done? What can they still
do?
In one of the final clips of
the film, Kholoud Helmi,
33, who earlier described
the uprising in the most ro-
wishes for anymore. What
she wants most dearly —
a brother who was disap-
peared by the security
forces — can never be re-
turned.
It is to Afineevsky’s credit
that he leaves these ques-
tions unanswered. The truth
is, Syria’s future is dark, and
any accounting for the re-
alities today reveals there is
little room for hope.
At its core, “Cries For Syria”
is unsparing. But whether
it will move American and
European viewers to rethink
their posture toward refu-
gees is anyone’s guess. His-
tory suggests that feelings
of collective generosity are
ephemeral.q