(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
"You have to know the causes of an illness to be able to treat it," says the Russian-born director Evgeny Afineevsky when Ny Tid meets him at the Bergen International Film Festival. The medicine metaphor refers to the war in Syria, which he portrays in the current cinema documentary Cries from Syria. Here Afineevsky paints a clear picture of the development in the country from the riots during the Arab Spring in 2011 to today, told by Syrians in opposition to Assad's regime.
Re-telling. “I wanted to tell a more comprehensive story than the fragmented elements that get through the news. There is a big gap in Western media's coverage of the crisis in Syria up to 2015, when the refugee stream hit Europe seriously. Jordan and other countries in the Middle East had experienced this already from 2011 – 12, but no one talked about it, ”he says.
Afineevsky therefore traveled to Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, as well as across the border to Syria, to understand what was going on.
"I realized I was in the midst of the darkest moments in Syria's history. I decided to retell it in the movie, to explain to the world in detail about the atrocities and inhumanities that played out and still take place there. ”
Conversations. Cries form Syria consists of a series of interviews with Syrian resistance fighters and other eyewitnesses, as well as a very comprehensive video material that provides detailed documentation of the violence and destruction that has taken place during Bashar al-Assad over the past six years. The approach is reminiscent of Afineevsky's previous documentary Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom, which portrayed the Euromaidan uprisings in Ukraine, and was nominated for an Oscar last year for best documentary.
“I was gradually introduced to various Syrian activists. As I built up trust, they let me meet more and more people who opened up and gave me their stories – as well as material they themselves or friends of them had filmed. This is how we got about 20 gigabytes of Syria footage, which my talented editor and co-producer Aaron I. Butler managed to edit down to a two-hour movie in just eleven weeks. ”The director admits that for both space and educational reasons had to exclude certain aspects of the conflict – such as religion.
The kids have to build. Cries from Syria starts with the famous pictures of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, who is dead on a beach in Turkey. This effectively sets the tone for a chime that contains a lot of tearing material and is largely about children.
"In the film, the three iconic images of Syrian children are used for the first time simultaneously, and through them the story is told," says Afineevsky. The other two images he is aiming at are footage of five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, who is bloody and dusty in an ambulance after being rescued from an air raid against Aleppo by the government forces, as well as an interview with seven-year-old Bana Alabed, who is known to tweet messages about the situation in the same city until she managed to evacuate from there.
“To me, Alan symbolizes the death of the younger generation, which was how it started. Omran symbolizes resistance and survival, while Bana represents hope, ”says the filmmaker.
"The children are both the victims and the heroes of this story. The rebellion started with the young. Later, there were children who burned car tires to smoke the city as protection against air strikes. It is also this generation that will eventually rebuild Syria – which is why I end the film with hope. "
Feel, not just look. I Cries from Syria relates involved how young people in Daraa sprayed "It's your turn, Doctor" on the walls, referring to the country's medical educated president, inspired by the riots that had just started in Tunisia. The regime responded by arresting, torturing and killing children and young people, leading to peaceful demonstrations in the streets – which were then met with bullets and more brutality from the authorities.
Recordings in the film show not only direct torture, but also how the abused child corpses were sent to relatives, presumably to scare people from further rebellion. But instead the revolution spread to the whole country.
“We had to follow our inner compass with the use of shaky imagery, and have placed around 60 on a scale of 1 to 100 for how far we could have gone. I wanted to show it the way it was. It is important that people not only see, but also feel how war can be today. Still, I didn't want to overlook the crowd, and used some kind of personal censorship for what I could show, "says the director. He himself suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome after working with the film, he says.
Syria is the world. Afineevsky, who is a US citizen, speaks with passion and passion. One can suspect that his form of communication is characterized by the fact that the Syria conflict has probably been even more poorly covered in the US than, for example, in Norway. Nevertheless Cries from Syria both a strong documentation and a welcome summary of the events of the last six years in the country, which with its easy-to-understand presentation can potentially reach many. In the US, the film is distributed through the cable company HBO, while the two-year-old Winter on fire is available on Netflix.
Afineevsky wants to inform about the situation in Syria, both to learn lessons and to show more compassion for Syrian refugees. "Look at Turkey, where journalists who criticize Erdogan are imprisoned. In Russia, they only have one-sided media. Also in my home country USA you see such a trend, where all criticism of Trump is labeled as "fake news". Although people are not yet being prosecuted for their opinions here, I find that more and more people in the United States are afraid to speak out. For me, this movie is about much more than just a refugee crisis. Although Syria seems far away, similar situations can occur anywhere in the world. These Syrians are fighting for the values we share with them and which we also need to protect. "
Cries from Syria was recently shown at the Bergen International Film Festival, and has its regular premiere in Norwegian cinemas October 13.
