Images from Syria

There’s an open letter by Syrian artists published today in Le Monde—the filmmakers Hala Alabdalla and Ossama Mohammed, the actress Reem Ali, and the cartoonist Ali Ferzat are among its first fifty signatories—titled “Deliver Syria So That It Regains the Right to Live and to Create!” It’s agonizing; it should be widely read in its entirety. Here is an excerpt:

Directors, academics, musicians, men and women of letters, writers and journalists are arrested and threatened with death, beaten with electric cables, then abandoned in dungeons… Individuals who embody peace and civic-mindedness have been savagely assassinated. The pro-democratic activist Ghiyath Matar offered water and roses to soldiers. He was killed. The voice of the protesters Ibrahim Qachouch wrote the song “Syria Wants Freedom”; his throat was cut. The human-rights activist Farzat Yahya Jarban filmed the demonstrations; his eyes were torn out. Hamza, a thirteen-year-old boy, was killed and his body mutilated. Hajar, a young girl, was riddled with bullets. Thousands of other people have been reported missing.

Today, we are compelled to choose between our humanity and a regime that has the blood of Syrians on its hands. Today, we declare ourselves to be on the side of freedom and creativity.

Ossama Mohammed is a principal subject of Lawrence Wright’s remarkable 2006 report about Syrian cinema and its makers. Other signatories—including Nabil Maleh and Fares Helou—also spoke with Wright for that article, which offers a painful image of repression in Syria and is astonishingly premonitory of the widespread frustration with the regime that many Syrians are now openly, bravely, and tragically expressing.

Omar Amiralay, a filmmaker who spoke with Wright, died last February. The letter in Le Monde expresses the wish for “a Syria that celebrates the films of Omar Amiralay in a movie theatre that bears his name.” Here’s a moving anecdote about Amiralay from Wright’s piece:

In 1978, in conjunction with the French journal Cahiers du Cinéma, the club sponsored two weeks of “cinema and politics.” There were two screenings a day in a seven-hundred-seat theatre rented for the occasion. “We sold out every performance,” Amiralay recalled. The critics of Cahiers du Cinéma had chosen eighteen films, but the Syrian government banned more than half of them. Instead, the French critic Serge Daney sat on the stage and narrated detailed descriptions of them. “It was a screening without an image—an absolutely beautiful happening,” Amiralay said.

In their letter, Syrian filmmakers are sending out horrifying images by means of their words, making documentaries that can’t be made; what they show is horrifying, but it’s also courageous and hopeful.

Photograph of Ossama Mohammed by Kate Brooks/Polaris.