It’s Virtually Impossible to Enter Syria. These Filmmakers Are Still Documenting It.

It’s Virtually Impossible to Enter Syria. These Filmmakers Are Still Documenting It.

To make a documentary about Syria is to accept that you will probably never set foot in the country—..

To make a documentary about Syria is to accept that you will probably never set foot in the country—and if you do, it could mean putting your life on the line. Syria has become incredibly hostile for civilians—who have had to endure the brutal Bashar al-Assad regime and attacks by the Islamic State—let alone for outsiders attempting to document it all. Yet somehow the awards race in the documentary category this year is likely to feature several films about Syria, including Sebastian Junger and Nick Quested’s Hell on Earth, Matthew Heineman’s City of Ghosts, and Evgeny Afineevsky’s Cries from Syria. These come on the heels of last February’s documentary-short Oscar winner, The White Helmets, about civilian first responders in the war-torn country. Whether these films make the Academy’s documentary-branch short list should be known this week. (It is usually announced the first week of December.)

But, for now, these three films—as well as Feras Fayyad’s Last Men in Aleppo—are being honored this month with the International Documentary Association’s Courage Under Fire Award, which typically is given to just one documentarian. The organization broadened the award’s scope this year to recognize these films’ value in highlighting a conflict that “touches all of humanity.”

For Junger, a V.F.contributing editor, and Quested, the process of making their film began in 2014 with research trips to southern Turkey and northern Iraq, and ended with a small cadre of Syrians willing to film their own struggles. Though the doc takes a historical approach to the conflict, tackling key questions about how the civil war began and how ISIS gained and maintained prominence, it also uses ample footage provided by Syrian journalists to show what everyday life is like in the country. The filmmakers built these connections by working partly out of Turkey, which is now home to about three million Syrian refugees. “You can meet those people and let them evaluate you,” Junger said. “They have friends in Syria. You can effectively work with the population without going into Syria.”

Filling out the historical background, the filmmakers were able to land experts including Senator John McCain—who is a fan of Junger’s Oscar-nominated doc, Restrepo—and Michael Flynn, Trump’s controversial former national-security adviser, whose view on the Syrian crisis was surprisingly divergent from the White House’s. “We like to joke that it was probably the last honest interview he ever gave,” Junger said. “We interviewed him before he joined the Trump administration, and we put the film together before he was fired.”

WAR STORIES
A scene from Matthew Heineman’s City of Ghosts.

COURTESY OF AMAZON STUDIOS/A&E INDIEFILMS/IFC FILMS

The doc centers on a family that was in an ISIS-controlled territory and was planning to escape. Quested and Junger found them through a fixer and were able to get them a camera and instructions, translated into Arabic, that showed how to take effective footage, including of their children. “Above all, tell us how you feel,” Quested told them.

“I found these people to be enormously credible, ethical, articulate, and sensitive,” Junger said. “They were dream subjects.”

For Heineman, the scope of the Syrian crisis is funneled through one specific channel: an examination of the citizen activist group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently. At immense risk, the group documents everyday life in its namesake city, which was the de facto capital of ISIS. The film captures the personal traumas that these men face as a price of their activist work: in one scene, an R.B.S.S. cameraman named Hamoud is shown re-watching a video of ISIS executing his father. Despite the danger, many in the group show their faces for the first time in City of Ghosts, stepping out from behind social media, where much of their work is done. “I was struck by the sacrifices they had endured, and I knew their story could provide an intimate, character-driven window into life under ISIS,” Heineman said.

The filmmaker, who previously helmed the Academy Award-nominated Cartel Land, wanted to skirt as close to Syria as possible, filming the group’s members as they were fleeing to Europe. In order to make the film safely, he adopted R.B.S.S.’s practice of encrypting everything, and he put nothing online. Later, he let members preview the final version, just in case he had included anything that could be inadvertently life-threatening.

It took about a year to shoot the documentary and collect hundreds of hours of archival footage from the group. “I was always trying to find the safest ways to film,” Heineman said.

For Evgeny Afineevsky, his journey with Cries from Syria led him straight to the country’s border and beyond; he’s the only director in this group to have actually shot footage in Syria himself. An independent filmmaker who became interested in the plight of Syrian refugees while making the Oscar-nominated 2015 film Winter on Fire, Afineevsky wanted to explore the events that led to the mass exodus of civilians.

cries from syria

A scene from Evgeny Afineevsky’s Cries from Syria.

COURTESY OF HBO

He traveled to the country in 2015, quickly putting together a network of “journalists, local fixers, and Syrian activists,” and he used archival footage to supplement his own. Though he was able to build enough trust to get what he needed, he found that many people he sought out distrusted him because he was coming from America.

“For many, the U.S. military had promised to help people under dictators, like in Iraq and Libya, but the people ended up feeling betrayed,” he said. Afineevsky had to prove his dedication as a documentarian who wanted to relay the harrowing stories he was hearing. “Working with people from a war zone means you have to be more sensitive as a director,” he added.

Though the filmmakers had their own initial reasons for making their documentaries, they all walked away with a similar notion: that the people of Syria, caught in the throes of terrorism and political upheaval, deserve to be heard. “Good, dignified, honest people get caught in civil wars not of their own making, and they do whatever they have to to survive,” Junger said. “That either means fighting, or it means fleeing and becoming a refugee. Either way, those people need our compassion.”

Get Vanity Fair’s HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Yohana DestaYohana Desta is a Hollywood writer for VanityFair.com.

CATEGORIES
Share This