Nadine Fattaleh - Thesis Proposal

Syrian National Cinema: before and after the revolution (very tentative title)

Abstract:

In this thesis, I will look at ways in which cinema has contributed to the formation and
representation of Syrian culture and identity. Firstly, I will review the history of Syrian national
cinema, which centers around a government-sponsored National Film Organization that trained
filmmakers in the USSR in the 1970s and employed them to write, produce and distribute Syrian
films. NFO filmmakers came from abroad with a commitment to create a cinematic culture that
negotiates and challenges social and cultural norms. However, they were limited by the
censorship of the government, and their non-profit filmmaking scheme that only allowed for a
limited number of films to be produced every year, with limited distribution. In 2011, with the
start of the uprisings, many established Syrian filmmakers joined the ranks of the opposition and
fled abroad for fear of persecution. They have made films that benefitted from international
interest in documenting the situation in Syria and from their increasing ability to articulate
resistance to the regime. In addition to the established first generation of Syrian filmmakers, a
number of new players have joined the expanded sphere of Syrian cinema. These foreign
filmmakers interested in documenting specifically the situation of Syrian refugees, both living
inside of refugee camps in neighboring Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon, or traveling across the
Mediterranean and arriving on Greek or Italian shores. In addition, a younger generation of
amateur and professional Syrian filmmakers have been using cinema as a way of constructing
and envisioning a new diasporic identity in exile. My work seeks to explore the production of
new identities through film as a genealogy that stems from the original history of national
cinema in Syria pre-revolution in Syria, to the new cinema post-revolution.

The history of Syrian National Cinema

The Baath partys constitution, written in 1947, indicated that film-making would become a
foundational instrument of the government. In 1963, the National Film Organization (NFO) was
established as an arm of the Ministry of Culture. The organizations primary role was to facilitate
and finance the production, dissemination, and the import and export of films. By 1972, The
NFO had seven directors, five cameramen, an editing suite, a lab for developing black and white
film, and a sound studio (Salti, 2006). The organization followed the socialist ideology of the
Baathist party in a number of ways; notably, the government believed in the power of education
and sent many young filmmakers to study abroad in the former USSR, including Moscows All-
Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK). In 1975, a generation of filmmakers including
Mohammad Malas, Samir Zikra, Oussama Mohammad and Nabil al-Maleh returned from
Moscow equipped with the skills and energy to transform Syrian society through filmmaking. As
Malas puts it, when we started our lives in cinema, we had many, many hopes of making
something of our society. We dreamt that culture and cinema could bring about change in our
society, our lives, and our relationships with power (Malas, 2009). I quote Malas here because I
think it illustrates that, despite being trained and employed as mouthpieces for the government,
Syrian filmmakers, immediately after their return, saw their roles as artists and intellectuals in
challenging their relationship with power.

Syrian filmmakers were limited by the governments need to censor all scripts and final films, as
well as the limited capacity for funds. Even in 2006, after many years of operating, the NFO only
had the capacity to produce about two feature-length films and a few documentaries and shorts
every year. In addition, the government monopolized the production industry and barred its
filmmakers from collaborations or co-productions with outside entities. Oussama Mohammad
writes: the NFO considers collaboration with European counterparts as the road map for
colonization (Mohammad, 2006). The government used anti-colonial as well as anti-Zionist
justification to stop its filmmakers from expanding their practices in collaboration with Western
filmmakers.

In addition, the government also closely controlled the dissemination and circulation of films.
Films by the NFO sometimes went to Cannes or Venice, but were more frequently distributed in
socialist cities like Algiers, Warsaw, Bucharest, Carthage or Moscow. What is most peculiar is
perhaps that NFO films didnt have wide distribution networks inside of Syria itself; the films
made tackled a number of social and economic issues that were important for the government to
exhibit abroad, but that it claimed the public [inside Syria] was not used to encountering. The
Damascus Film Festival was established by the NFO in 1979 and became the place where the
organizations films were screened to limited publics inside of Syria. The festival initially
focused on the Arab world, Latin America and Asia and it acquired an international focus in
2001. The film festival had been running until 2011.

Its worth thinking critically about what the role of Syrian national cinema is. In Critical
Nationals: The Paradoxes of Syrian Cinema film critic Rasha Salti draws from filmmaker
Bandar Abdul Hamids claim that there is no Syrian cinema, there are only Syrian Films and
Syrian Filmmakers. She points out four paradoxes of Syrian cinema, including: 1) its function
as an archive of national aspirations, documenting political events like the 1967 War with Israel
and the annexation of the Golan heights, 2) the limited distribution of Syrian films inside of
Syria, 3) its ability to function under tight state-control but still carve out a space for political
criticism and subversion, and finally 4) its ability to focus on the artistic expression of the
filmmaker without any concern for market or sales (Salti, 2006). I would like to keep these four
paradoxes in mind and return to them when discussing post-revolution cinema.

One notable exception of a foundational Syrian filmmaker who worked outside of the
government controlled NFO is Omar Amiralay who studied in Paris and worked on documenting
the governments infrastructural development projects in Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam
(1970) and Everyday Life in a Syrian Village (1974). Amiralay was critical of the regime and
lived in exile for most of his life, while still producing films that critiqued the Baath regime. In
2003, he returned to Syria to film A Flood in Baath Country, a revision of his original praise of
the Euphrates Dam and critique of the regimes industrialization project in the way that they left
the poor and rural populations disenfranchised. Because of his access to resources, Amiralay has
produced far more films than his counterparts working for the NFO, who have produced only
two or three films in their thirty or forty year careers. Amiralay was disillusioned with the
banning and censoring of his films, and other political films inside of Syria, so he established the
Arab Institute of Film (AIF) which supported specifically documentary filmmaking inside of
Syria. AIF left Damascus for Lebanon after harassment from the Syrian government, and was
renamed Screen Institute Beirut (Van De Peer, The Guardian).

Potential avenues for expansion and intervention

To expand on my history of the Syrian National Cinema above, I will do a number of things.
First, I will theorize what the idea of a national cinema is, and what role it plays. There are some
film theorists who have written about the importance of national cinema in creating an imaginary
national community (Anderson, 1983), and I would like to scrutinize this claim in light of what
Rasha Salti has written about the paradoxes of Syrian national cinema.

Thus far, I have dealt with the institutional history of the development of Syrian cinema and the
training of filmmakers, but I would like to delve deeper into the plots, themes and characters of
some of the masterpieces of Syrian cinema. It would be interesting to look at the way these films
have already been dealing with issues of displacement and war in relation to the 1967 war with
Israel and the loss of the Golan Heights. This will foreground a discussion of the continuities of
various themes in Syrian cinema, and will allow me to make a strong claim about Syrian
cinemas ability to capture the feelings of economic disenfranchisement and political suppression
that are at the heart of the 2011 revolution.

One thing I would be interested in further emphasizing is the distinction between documentary
and fiction film production. Fiction film was the preferred medium for feature-length projects
undertaken by NFO filmmakers. By contrast, Omar Amiralay was a documentarian and has
spoken out a number of times about the underdevelopment of documentary as a medium in
Syrian and Arab cinema. His continued engagement with political, social and economic
questions while living in exile is enabled by the documentary medium. Introducing a bit of
theory about the relationship between fiction and documentary national cinema might be
interesting here. It might help to suggest that fiction filmmaking was popular because it allowed
government-employed filmmakers to make subversive films that communicated political and
social critiques and commentary indirectly through signs and symbols.

I would also like to do some more research and situate the film industry in Syria alongside a
number of other flourishing industries in the cultural sphere. I would highlight the TV series
productions, which have been the subject of many studies by Western anthropologists, as well as
literally and theatre spheres. The first generation of Syrian filmmakers have actually worked
closely with a number of novelists on film adaptations including Moahmmad Malas
collaboration with Egyptian novelist Sunallah Ibrahim, Nabil al-Malehs collaboration with with
Hayday Haydar on The Leopard and Tawfiq Salehs collaboration with Ghassan Kanafani on an
adaptation of his short story, Men in the Sun, in a film called The Dupes.

The Revolution

2011 marked the beginning of a popular uprisings where the Syrian people voiced their demands
for more equitable political representation and expressed years of social and economic
disenfranchisement at the hands of the Baathist regime. The militarization of the uprisings
created a civil war that drew a range of international actors, notably Russia, Iran and the Gulf
States, who are fighting a proxy war in Syria today. The war has thus far left around 500,000
people dead, 4.5 million people as refugees outside of the countrys borders, and an estimated 7
million internally displaced (About the Crisis, Syrian Arab Republic." UN OCHA). In spite of
the death, displacement and suffering that the Syrian people have seen, the uprisings turned civil
war opened up a new ground for the production, dissemination and consumption of films and
visual images. Although the National Film Organization still operates today, many of its veteran
filmmakers have left the ranks of government loyalists and have joint the opposition. Oussama
Mohammads film, Silvered Water: Syria Self-Portrait, is a romantic view of the war in Syria
from the perspective of the exiled filmmaker, currently living in Paris. The established
filmmakers have been joined by a new generation of documentarians currently residing both
inside and outside of Syria. In addition, there is interest from Western filmmakers in
documenting the situation in Syria and the resulting refugee crisis. The situation has also
provided ground for the development of new and innovative image-forms that bear witness to the
situation in Syria and articulate political disenfranchisement to a Western or international public
disillusioned by six years of fighting.

Changes in Themes, Mediums, Topics and Aesthetics

While the film industry has opened up new possibilities of production and distribution post-
revolution, the image has also allowed Syrian filmmakers to negotiate new forms of belonging
and new national identities. The industry has produced a number of foreign documentarians that
have become interesting in mediating images of Syrian to the public, and have opened up
discussions on what Syrians, and specifically refugees now mean to the world. In order to be able
to focus on key themes, I will divide the post-revolution Syrian films into the following
categories. Films about:
1. The revolution
2. Journeying
3. Refugee camps
 4. Internal displacement, struggle and identity in diaspora
5. New mediums like Abunaddara and the Mobile Syrian Film Festival

Here, Im unsure whether or not I want to focus on every single form equally, or whether I can
just briefly review each one and then focus on the journeying, refugee camps and identity in
diaspora aspects. I will need to justify this, which will re-frame my entire essay.

Journeying, refugee camps, and identity in diaspora

Refugee camp category of films

General characteristics:
Made by foreign filmmakers through access they are granted from UN agencies and
NGOs
Identify refugees as those living in the camp, a territorially bounded place for cultural
production and social life
Feature mediated narratives of refugees living in the camp, oftentimes alongside expert-
knowledge generated by the international community

Here, I want to highlight that these films are largely Western filmmakers in camps observing the
lives of others and noting what they see. The definition of refugees in these films is rooted in
legalistic terms, in other words refugees are people identified according the UN Geneva
Convention of 1951 and the additional protocols. To emphasize this legal definition, several
films feature scenes with refugees introducing the audience to their refugee identification cards
produced by the UNHCR. These films follow official humanitarian industrys discourse on
refugees, the images are often depoliticized and show refugees as victims or as objects of
humanitarian need. Here, I will elaborate on specific scenes in films and how they relate to the
scholarly and anthropological work on refugees by scholars like Liisa Malkki, Michel Agier and
Didier Fassin. I will also draw from Gorgio Agambens notion of the camp as a state of exception
to discuss how these films are a reflection of the depoliticized bare life of refugees who do not
have a voice, or the right to have rights according to Arendts definition.

I think these films are by definition unconcerned with negotiating what it means to be Syrian
after the revolution. They are rather attempts to raise awareness about the humanitarian situation
of refugees in general, in that way they do, to a certain extent propagate an of an essence of the
refugee experience. Here, I will draw from work on the refugee experience which was the
old sociological paradigm in the works of scholars like Barry Stein and Allen Keller. In a
different articulation of the refugee experience I will pull from Arjun Appandurais work
Putting Hierarchies in their Place, where he argues that anthropological strategies for localizing
non-Western people tends to focus on confinement through a process of representational
essentializing that places one aspect of the native culture, in this case their legal refugee status, as
epitomizing them as a whole (Appandurai, 1988).
I would also like to point out the potential for filmmaking to subvert narratives about the
depoliticized spaces of refugee camps. For example, Renzo Martins episode III is a
documentary shot in a refugee camp in Congo where the artist situates himself at the center of
the narrative. He goes around the camp wearing a straw hat and asking refugees what they
thought of him. In that way, he ridicules the work of journalists who visit the camp and
instrumentalizes refugee narratives. He also ridicules the white man burdens approach that
humanitarian organizations take when they work with refugees. But in thinking about how this
artwork negotiates the representation of the refugee Im struck by the limits of performative
ridicule. Martins work explores how humanitarianism depoliticizes the image of the refugee but
it doesnt offer an alternative. In addition, the works existence is grounded in the same
framework as its object of critique and ridicule (Western humanitarian agencies). That is, Renzo
Martins access to the camp is predicated on his status as an affluent white artist.

In addition, I want to discuss works by Palestinian filmmakers working in refugee camps. Here, a
historical look at the evolution of films on Palestinian refugee camps would be interesting. I
speculate that there is a history of foreigners making films about camps, and now a newer
generation of filmmakers who are making autobiographical films like Mahdi Fleifls A World
Not Ours and Kamal al-Jaafaris Recollections. Fleifls film is specifically interesting because it
shows the aftermath of refugee management policies that enclose young people, offer limited
opportunities for studying, and no prospects for finding work under the Lebanese national law.
The portrait of the camp from the perspective of the filmmaker, who grows up visiting his
grandfather and uncles in Ein al-Hilwa (while he lives permanently in Dubai), shows the
evolution of his relatives from inspired teenagers working for Fateh, a Palestinian political party,
to old, disillusioned, unemployed adults who feel disenfranchised and helpless in every way. The
somber ending to documentary, which leaves the viewer despairing for any glimpse of hope for
the young men of Ein al-Hilwa, is a testament to the failure of humanitarian management
strategies that have been operating in the camp for years. Its message is very important, and
stands as a warning for the strategies currently adopted to manage Syrian refugees in places like
Zaatari refugee camp, where many of the above films are shot. Because the filmmaker is a
member of the community, he is able not only to observe, but to truly bear witness. This
testimony is the type of honesty that we would like to see, but very fundamentally cant, from the
work on Syrian refugees living in the camp.

In comparing films about Zaatari refugee camp, with Martin and Fleifils films, I want to discuss
the question of time in documentary filmmaking. The power of documentary (as opposed to
photography) is its ability to capture the experience of time. But also time in the sense of short-
term vs. long-term, in that the films about Syria now cannot look beyond their own timeframe
and anticipate the gloomy, and somewhat predetermined future of most refugees living in the
camp. Many filmmakers in Zaatari ask refugees whether they had any desire to return. A
pessimistic viewer would point out the romanticism in this question: of course refugees would
like to return, but the reality is that they are bound to stay where they are for around 17 years,
according to the UNHCRs predictions. The desire to go back aligns with the legal discourse on
the repatriation of refugees, which is very difficult and complicated as history has shown us. In
addition, the whole discourse on return assumes that there is a place to return to, while in
reality home and nation are at this point radically different places.

Journeying category of films

General characteristics:
Eurocentric in that their main focus is on refugees crossing the Mediterranean to reach
Europe, with disregard to the places of origin
Focus on the in-betweeness or the sea, ocean and boat as the site for understanding the
refugee experience
Highlight that the journey becomes an important part of the refugee identity

In The Turbulence of Migration, Papastergiadis discusses the linearity of mechanistic characters

of migrations flows in the early modern period. For example, labor migration from the colony to
the metropole during British industrialization, or the great migration of African Americans from
South to North in the United States does follow a linear trajectory that can easily be mapped
(Papastergiadis, 2000). However, the challenge in the globalized world is that there is no simple
origin or end to the journey. In fact, the journey in its experience of movement has produced new
forms of belonging that shapes cultural identity. This needs to form the basis of our
understanding of the journeying films. Although many of these films feature actual footage from
migrants crossing boats, they also include narratives that complicate the places that the refugees
have come from, and the routes they have taken to end up where they are, often the shores of
Greece or Italy.

The importance of journeying films is that they situate the recent history of Syrian refugees
crossing the Mediterranean to find a home in Europe, with the history of economic migrants
from Iraq, Afghanistan and North Africa who have been taking the risky journey across the
Mediterranean for many years. For example, the film Fire at Sea by Italian filmmaker
Gianfranco Rosi explores the relationship between the local inhabitants of Lampidusa and the
arriving migrants. One striking scene is in the detention center where all the young men are
playing football, and the teams are organized around national lines, so there is a team for Syria,
one for Liberia, one for Iraq, etc. This puts into context that one category of Syrian refugees are
now grouped together with migrants taking on other journeys through other means and for
different reasons. Rosi delivers a lot of nuance in the way that he portrays the migrants
experience on the boat. He has very carefully filmed portraits of migrants suffering when they
arrive at the Italian border, and even shots of dead bodies being unloaded and prepared for burial
though he doesnt fall into the trap of aestheticizing death and suffering. As a critic recently
wrote in The Guardian, he [Rosi] doesnt bear witness an overused and often presumptuous
idea. He observes, with humility and precision. Instead of raising awareness, he cultivates
alertness (The Guardian, 2016).

A lot of recent anthropological work has focused on the importance of viewing cultural fluidity
and hybridity by liberating the site of the study of anthropology, and I would like to focus on this
in relation to the study of a number of films about voyaging. In the twentieth century, there has
been a focus on culture as a rooted body that grows, lives, dies, and is resurrected. As Raymond
Williams writes, the etymological origin of the world culture is in the verb to cultivate
(Williams, 1958). Per this definition of culture, when one is uprooted, or displaced, their original
culture is lost, it dies. This is not true, and begs for a definition of culture that contests this idea
of rootedness. James Clifford, writes that the localization of the object of study in anthropology
to the site of the field marginalizes and erases boundaries, histories, and identities from the
ethnographic frame (Clifford, 1984). The first erasure he identifies is the means of transport
itself; which would be the boat. In this case, the focus on voyaging is a focus on the means of
traveling and the technology that allows an arrival to a new place. The site of locating the culture
of refugees is found in the very act of travelling, and in viewing the means of travel as the site of
anthropology, or in this case filmmaking.

I also want to write a bit about the importance of voyaging films as opposed to photo-essays or
photojournalism about refugee voyages. Many popular and widely circulating photos of the
refugee crisis in Europe today follow a linear trajectory of arrival, transition and relocation.
The logic of these photographs assumes that there are clearly defined stages of a refugee
experience, which is the essence of all refugees or migrants crossing the Mediterranean. This
refugee essence is alluded to above in the work of now outdated sociological theory, but it seems
to still determine the practice of photographing refugees. In addition, the logic of arrival,
transition and relocation also erases the journey and what comes before it, namely that the people
who arrive, especially in the case of Syrians, have left somewhere. In many cases, they have
left Turkey, a temporary host country, but they have also left Syria fleeing war death and
displacement. As such, the logic of arrival, transition, and relocation disregards the Syrianness
of refugees, in terms of their belonging to some form of national culture and society which they
are fleeing. Abdelmalek Sayad, an Algeria-French sociologist might be interesting to bring up
here, because he notes that the discourse around immigrants in France is very Eurocentric and
disregards an analysis of the impact of immigration on host communities. He notes that a holistic
sociological study will come to terms with the fact that every immigration is an emigration, it
involves both a departure and an arrival, a loss and a gain (Saada, 2000). Focusing on voyaging
films disrupts this arrival, transition, relocation narrative because films are not just static
images, they involve audio and give a voice to the voyagers to tell stories about what came
before and what is to come next.

Internal displacement, struggle and identity in diaspora category of films

General characteristics:
 Mostly films made by Syrians
Reveal a sense of conflicted national identity, or a struggle to define what being Syrian
means in diaspora, and various ways that people cope with this

Here, I want to discuss a number of films made by Syrian filmmakers, especially the ones
featured in the Syrian film festival, and the film Silvered Water: Syria Self Portrait by pioneering
Syrian filmmaker Oussama Mohammad. I want to discuss these films alongside theorists that
have thought about a post-national identity, mainly Appadurai and Stuart Hall.

There are many articulations of the post-national; for example transnationalism, multiculturalism
or cosmopolitanism as existing paradigms within the nation-state order that challenge the rigidity
of national identity. These post-national potentialities as Arjun Appadurai calls them are a
result of a globalized world. The globalization discourse is important in the context of refugee
studies because it provides a framework for understanding cultural exchange beyond nation.
Globalization is defined as the process whereby transnational actors like globalized capitalism
influence nation-states. Appadurai identifies the importance of linking mass migration with mass
media in a globalized world; arguing that the flow of people in unprecedented levels is also
coupled with the mass flow of images. He finds in moving images produced and consumed by
deterritorialized people a practice of social imagination that may be thought of as the foundation
of a post-national society. Here, Appadurai draws from Anderson to argue for a diasporic
imagination fueled by mass media that is similar to the national imagination that was once fueled
by print capitalism. Appaduris notion of diasporic public spaces is also important insofar as
cultural identity preoccupies the construction of the public sphere (Appadurai, 1995). I will
discuss the way in which the Syrian Film Festival is an articulation of a diasporic imagination
and how it may relate to the government sponsored Damascus Film Festival.

The focus thus far in the section of post-revolution films has been on culture not on identity
but I would like to negotiate the identity of Syrians after the revolution as they appear in a
number of films. Here, Stuart Hall discusses the importance of the medium of documentary film
in constituting diasporic identities. He writes: We have been trying to theorize identity as
constituted, not outside but within representation; and hence of cinema, not as a second-order
mirror held up to reflect what already exists, but as that form of representation which is able to
constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover places from which to
speak (Hall, 1990). This I think is a really important claim, and will help me suggest the
incredible value of filmmaking, but probably other forms of art, in discovering or negotiating a
new identity at a moment when Syrians feel disillusioned with national identity.

Changes in Production and Distribution Patterns

Because of international interest in the war in Syria and the resulting refugee crisis, there are new
avenues for funding Syrian film projects. Some filmmakers have applied to grants that are
specifically targeted at Arab or Syrian filmmakers, like the Biddayat or Screen Institute Beirut
grants, while others have sought co-production or co-directing with Western filmmakers and
production companies, notably ones in Europe where some refugees have been resettled.
However, because of the way that independent and grant-driven filmmaking works, this form of
film production often leave filmmakers vulnerable economically and financially, and few
emerging filmmakers can afford to focus specifically on their art, while many do it alongside
other day jobs.

The commercialization of film production, in contrast to the non-for-profit model of the NFO has
meant that these films have been widely screened and distributed. For example, Talal Derkis
The Return to Homs is distributed worldwide on Netflix, probably for a huge commercial gain.
In addition, international interest in Syria has meant that Syrian films, made by both Syrian and
foreign filmmakers have been more widely featured in the traditional film festival circuit, by that
I mean Cannes, Toronto, Locarno, etc. In addition, the recent emergence of film festivals
focusing specifically on human rights, like the Human Rights Film Festival held in NYC and
sponsored by Human Rights Watch, are a venue for many Syrian films especially ones that speak
the liberal language of universal human rights. Its interesting to note that films screening at
human rights festivals are often by foreign filmmakers who view the situation in Syria and the
refugee crisis through the lens of human rights, as opposed to national liberation or revolutionary
struggle. Lastly, I want to focus on the development of the Syrian Film Festival in Toronto that
functions as a diasporic public space for generations of Syrian immigrants living in Canada
(Appadurai, 1995). Given my fieldwork at the Syrian Film Festival, I would like to dedicate a
slightly extended look at this space and what it has come to mean.

In order to prove my point above, I have created a document that tracks Syrian films before and
after the revolution, and I hopefully be able to make a quantitative point in illustrating how
many more films are produced, how they are funded, where they are screened and how they are
distributed. While not falling into the risk of being too data-focused, I want this to serve as an
exercise in mapping the current landscape of Syrian films available. I hope to make this map
partially available online on a blog to direct enthusiasts about where they can find films and what
is out there. The link to the document is public as I imagine this to be participatory:
https://docs.google.com/a/columbia.edu/spreadsheets/d/1Y33grD2Y8_lRZhDqiyHqetoBn1Yb5r
kkRibjxXTTlus/edit

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Films:

After the Spring. Dir Ellen Martinez and Steph Ching. 2015.

Syrian Eagles. Dir Aisha Jamal and Lucius Dechausay. 2016.

Nouran. Dir Nouran Alchalati. 2014.

Suleima. Dir. Jalal Magout. 2014.

Transit Game. Dir. Anna Fahr. Sepasi Films, 2014.

My Aleppo. Dir Melissa Langer. 2015.

Jihad in Hollywood. Dir Genie Deez. University of Southern California, School of Cinematic
Arts, 2015.
The Crossing. Dir. George Kurian. Grnder Film, 2015.

Episode III. Dir Renzo Martens. 2008.

A World Not Ours. Dir Mahdi Fleifl. 2012.

Fire at Sea. Gianfranco Rosi. Dir 2016

Silvered Water: Syria Self Portrait. Dir Oussama Mohammad. 2014.

Return to Homs. Dir Talal Derki. 2014.