In new movie ‘Cries from Syria,’ an eerily timely riposte to the Donald Trump ban
On Friday, just a few hours before Donald Trump would announce an executive action banning many residents of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S., the filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky was engaging in a different sort of governmental interaction.
Afineevsky was at a Salt Lake City science museum screening his new film, “Cries from Syria,” for Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams and other local officials. The film offers a detailed and devastating account of the civil war that has gripped the country for more than five years, and its director was on a mission — he wanted the images of brutality to serve as a wake-up call for supporters of exactly the kinds of policies undertaken by the new president.
“As soon as it’s seen, it open minds and hearts — these are human beings that have families,” Afineevsky said in an interview. “This movie can be a tool in helping people understand.” McAdams, a Democrat, later said his jurisdiction would not enforce Trump’s ban.
You can talk to a lot of artists about repression. Few have the experience that Afineevsky does.
The 44-year-old filmmaker, who now makes his home in Los Angeles, was born in the U.S.S.R. circa 1972. He spent the first 18 years of his life under Soviet rule, in the Muslim-majority republic of Tatarstan. He left because he felt he couldn’t express himself artistically in his home country, emigrating first to Israel and then to the U.S., where he is now a citizen.
More recently, though, he’s been toiling much farther away: on the Turkey-Syria border, and sometimes in war-torn Syria itself, with the people who either can’t afford or can’t bring themselves to leave. He’s spent two years there investigating the Syrian civil war for his new movie, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last week ahead of its debut on HBO in March.
“People need to hear these stories. But the world is silent,” Afineevsky said, speaking in the incongruous precincts of this picturesque resort town.
“The obligation is for filmmakers to take the accounts of those no longer with us and bring them to people. It’s depressing to read the news,” he added. “Nobody wants to educate themselves. I want to tell a comprehensive story the audience needs to hear.”
Afineevsky is certainly well-positioned to convey what’s happening in the most volatile — and, as the events of the last few days make clear, sometimes most misunderstood — country in the Middle East.
“Cries from Syria” shows, via both direct interviews with a range of Syrian people and voluminous images from citizen journalists, the ordinary folks caught in the war between Bashar Assad’s military, the Free Syrian Army, the Syrian Democratic Forces and various jihadi groups — a conflict that has claimed as many as 470,000 lives and still rages on.
Screening for the first time just days before Trump’s executive action, the film serves as a kind of humanist response to the president’s ban. To those who say such measures are needed to stop terrorism, the film powerfully and often graphically shows what many of these so-called threats are: victims themselves.
In one scene, a father is seen trying to save his children on a rickety boat in the Mediterranean as, one by one, they slip through his hands and drown.
In another, a school is under an aerial attack — a tragedy remembered only because a young boy and his cousin were allowed to leave after sitting more quietly than anyone in the class. By the time they arrive home, the entire school has been razed by a missile, scores of their classmates killed.
In perhaps the most horrific scene, dozens of children are killed in a chemical raid by Assad’s army — an event portrayed with startling explicitness.
Afineevsky, who documented the 2014 Ukrainian revolution from the ground in his previous film, “Winter On Fire” (it was nominated for the documentary Oscar), has again gone deep to show a side of a conflict most mainstream journalism institutions lack either the resources or fortitude to chronicle.
“Cries from Syria” is thus more than a journalistic snapshot; it’s a definitive document of one of the most bloody of modern conflicts. What it lacks in easy digestibility — images such as the gassing make this one of the most difficult documentaries to watch…
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