“Every image was a victory against the regime”: a Syrian film-maker speaks out
I still remember the day I returned to Syria from Paris. I was seven years old, unable to speak a word of Arabic, curiously peering out the window at the streets. Images and statues of the same man were everywhere. I asked who it was, and my parents whispered in French not to talk about him. It was the late 1980s, and the man was Hafez Al-Assad, who had solidified his grip on the country after massacring 40,000 people in Hama in just three days. My first lesson in Arabic wasn’t linguistic – it was that we must never express what we truly felt.
At nine, I learnt this lesson the hard way. One evening, while my parents were hosting visitors, I was playing with my friend in my room. Our school notebooks lay on the floor, each bearing Assad’s photo – his image was ubiquitous. My friend, mimicking official rhetoric, praised him in exaggerated tones. I laughed at the absurdity. Moments later, she took the notebook to the living-room and loudly declared: “She doesn’t like the president, and she says no one in Syria does.” The room fell silent, thick with fear, until her mother broke it with a threat: “Teach your daughter to watch her words. If we weren’t friends, you would all disappear tonight.” I remember not only the dark feeling of a friend’s betrayal, but also the sleepless night my family endured, expecting at any moment to be held accountable for my words. People were vanishing for lesser reasons at that time. In Syria, even a child’s words could lead to disappearance.
Words and images were tightly controlled. The country mirrored Assad’s image, even in film. When I was growing up, Damascus had only two functioning cinemas and two TV channels, both heavily censored. The cuts in films were so abrupt that we could easily spot them. I began imagining the missing scenes, reconstructing stories in my mind. This was my first step toward film-making – imagining different scenarios and piecing together what censorship had cut.
At 18, while studying theatre in Damascus, I discovered an underground world of films. Secret clubs screened censored movies without any cuts, to be discussed in hushed gatherings. Public spaces were off-limits for such activities, as any assembly of more than five people was deemed illegal. Watching banned films together felt like a rebellious act. Pirated VHS tapes became prized treasures. It was that sense of flirting with danger that drew me to switch from theatre to film-making: every image seemed like a small victory against the Syrian regime.
I filmed my first documentary in 2008, set in a juvenile prison, without any official approval, and I screened it in small gatherings and festivals. Then came 2011, and with it, an unimaginable shift. Protests erupted, shattering decades of silence. Syrians were finally voicing what had been unspeakable. Yet, the collective trauma of the 1980s weighed heavily on us – we knew bloodshed would follow.
I used to slip through checkpoints with a Canon camera hidden in my stylish handbag. Dressing smartly, as if heading for drinks, helped me evade suspicion. One of my proudest anonymous works I have made from that time is Smuggling 23 Minutes of Revolution (2011), the first documentary to be broadcast about the Syrian uprising. My friend Reem Al Ghazzi filmed peaceful demonstrations in Hama and interviewed activists under perilous conditions. I edited and selected the footage alone in Damascus, delivering the finished film in a supermarket to her – like a smuggler, refusing any payment. The Mukhabarat, Syria’s secret-police force, eventually caught and tortured everyone involved in the film. For two months, I slept fully dressed, ready to be taken at any moment. I believe I evaded capture because my name – difficult to spell in Arabic – was misspelled on the first blacklist. They corrected it only after I had fled to Beirut at the end of 2012.
I started to work on my fiction films, while continuing to make anonymous documentaries. That didn’t spare me from being on blacklists, nor my family from receiving Mukhabarat ‘visits’ – a daily reminder that my words had consequences for them, despite the fact that I was by then safe in London. My parents refused to leave Damascus, even as their neighbourhood was bombed almost daily. My father, a surgeon, felt it was his duty to stay, secretly treating wounded demonstrators – acts the regime would punish harshly if uncovered. We all quietly, cautiously carried on doing our jobs.
That all changed in December 2024. Assad’s statues fell, one by one, across Aleppo, Hama, Daraa, and Homs. We couldn’t sleep for a week – not just because events were unfolding so quickly and unbelievably that we wanted to witness everything, but also because, on a simple, private level, my father was alone at that time in Damascus. We all spent hours on WhatsApp video calls, ensuring that, at least while we were speaking, nothing would happen to him. He sat in the dark, cold house without electricity for days, speaking to us like a caveman. The last two nights in Damascus were silent, haunted by trauma – not even the sound of a bomb. The streets were deserted: no cars rolling, no one walking.
On 7 December, as the rebel militant group HTS (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham) neared the capital, neighbourhoods dismantled his symbols of power. The next day, Assad fled to Moscow. For the first time, Syrians woke to a country free from dictatorship: prisons liberated, statues toppled, images torn down. After 13 years of war, during which millions had been displaced and countless lives lost, Syria was ours again. I was proud: a day before HTS entered Damascus, the statues were destroyed without foreign or local armies involved. The city was liberated by its citizens – a detail omitted in the news but one we hold on to with pride.
Immediately, friends and fans messaged me with hopes of finally watching my films in public screenings in Damascus, rather than in secret clubs. One friend asked if I would screen The Day I Lost My Shadow, my debut feature that won the Lion of the Future at Venice in 2018. We joked that it might need to be shown in another secret club, as some characters’ dialogue – questioning God’s existence amid war – had already provoked a backlash. Now, as cinema in Syria transitions from secret acts of defiance to public expressions, there’s a quiet concern that a new form of censorship may be on the horizon. Yesterday, a prominent talented Syrian actor I once worked with was brutally beaten for drunkenly uttering blasphemous words. The official Syrian TV channels broadcast brief news segments before going black. And in this blackness lies our fear – the fear strict interpretations of Islamic laws and Sharia will be inflicted on our cultural public space. For now, all our programmes, films and popular TV dramas are absent, not a priority.
The storm isn’t over yet. We’ve only just surfaced, gasping for air. Censorship still looms, but so does a new energy. Civil and cultural organisations are roaring to protect our fragile freedom. Syrians are fighting to reclaim public spaces and narratives, determined to clear the dark skies overhead. While the journey ahead is uncertain, one thing is clear: we’re finally swimming towards the shore.
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