INTERVIEW WITH RAMI FARAH AND LYANA SALEH

Rami Farah and Lyana Saleh on making a film about Syria from 12.756 fragments of footage and using it to take back control over how the conflict in Syria is portrayed and how it will be remembered.

INTERVIEWER: Can you tell me a bit about how this project came about and how it has developed?

RAMI: This project arose out of deep necessity. I was entrusted a harddisk with all this extremely important material from the very early days of the revolution by those who risked their lives documenting these extraordinary events and all the violence that followed. Citizen journalists in Daraa and all over Syria had been desperately trying to get the world’s attention through uploading their videos to all kinds of online platforms. I had to do something to bring this story to the attention of the world in a way which would make people actually understand these images coming out of Syria. But how could I tell this story out of all these low resolution anonymous shattered fragments without dates, without knowing who is filming and who is being filmed, without a greater idea of how the locations connected? This material was filmed for the moment.I realised that I had to map according to place, date and event. I also had to understand the city and introduce the real agents into the story. I also wanted to implicate the audience. Therefore this project actually started out very different from what it is now. I first imagined it as an interactive web documentary that would put the audiences in the shoes of a citizen journalist so that they could experience different sides of the conflict. But once we started engage with the archive in this way and involved the lead researcher Dima Saber and producer/co-director Signe Byrge Sørensen we realised that it would take time to really understand enough ourselves. It is really a schizophrenic situation to be in when you want to tell a story about an ongoing conflict, especially when this story is also your own story. And to take your time while people are being shot. But you need time to create a distance so you can observe in a different way. We kind of moved the harddisk out of the emergency room and put it into intensive care. It has been a long process, but we felt that it was necessary, both for our main characters and for us as filmmakers.

LYANA: From the beginning, it was very important for us to make something that showed a different side of Syria. Yadan, one of the activists in the film, once told me: »We only ever got to tell our death story. « And that remark stayed with me. Because that is one of the most painful things about the revolution. That it became all about death. Where was the story of Syrian lives? If you consider The Egyptian Revolution back in January 2011, what are the images that come to mind? Demonstrations, singing, the Tahrir square. Happy people. Confident people. Smiling people. Visually, it is these images that come to mind. Same thing with Tunisia. But Syria... the image is blurry, the camera is shaking, the colours are brown and red. It’s not hopeful.

INTERVIEWER: Your film has quite a unique approach and set-up, showing footage being projected onto a big screen in an empty theatre in front of the activists. How did you arrive at that? And how did you decide on which clips to show? What were your considerations?

RAMI: The idea of projecting the footage onto a big screen rose out of quite a practical problem. First of all, we were all in exile and could not return to Syria but had to come up with a way to visit it vicariously. Secondly, we had all this important footage that we were eager to present, but working with Signe and Janus (consulting editor, red), it quickly became clear that to non-Syrians, it was extremely difficult to decode. Even for us, it required quite a bit of detective work sometimes to determine exactly what we were looking at. Because filming and taking part in the demonstrations in Daraa quickly became very dangerous, people often disguised, making it hard to identify anyone in the footage - and easy for the regime to portray the peaceful protesters as terrorists and fanatics. Setting a scene where the citizen journalists could comment on and contextualize the footage, was not only a way to regain control over a narrative around the revolution that had been stolen from us - it was also a way of giving the citizen journalists back their identities - identities which they were forced to hide during the revolution. On this stage in front of our cameras, in this virtual Syria-outside-of-Syria, they could finally show their real faces and use their real voices. And that is so important. That is in itself a manifestation. It is why I became obsessed with following Fares Helou (in ‘A Comedian in a Syrian Comedy’, red) when he started demonstrating. Because he gave a face to a faceless revolution. His presence exposed the lies of the regime since everyone who knew Fares knew he was not a ‘terrorist’, as the Syrian regime would label anyone who protested. And the same goes for Yadan, Odai and Rani now. They are revolutionaries, yes, citizen journalists, yes, but also just normal guys who like to read and do sports, and who never thought they would end up being a part of something like this, and I think it is important to connect with audiences on this deeper human level.

LYANA: Something quite magical happened on that stage. In the beginning, the three of them were quite removed, their arms folded or pointing to different points on the drawing of Daraa. But as we continue to film, and the empty space comes alive with stories of Syria, you see how they start to immerse themselves in their memories and how the screen becomes a kind of door between exile and Syria, and past and present, which they can move through freely in order to revisit and review traumatic events from a safe distance. And that was an important dimension for us. The therapeutic one. Because there is a difference between filming and watching. And a difference between witnessing and processing. As we see in the film, sometimes the activist can’t identify their own footage. Sometimes, it is like they see it for the first time. We wanted to give them an opportunity to stay with it for a while, and reflect on its meaning and impact.

RAMI: It was very important for me to gather the three of them in one place so we could go from the personal towards the collective memory. The process involved me asking a lot of “really stupid questions” related to each image which would annoy them at times. But it was important to me to force them to state the obvious, exactly because what is obvious to them – and to me –isn’t obvious to others. By asking them with openness – as if I knew nothing - »what does this image mean? « I wanted to make them – and the people watching – understand the context and what these experiences meant to the citizen journalists.

LYANA: It is funny because you always hear the phrase: “a picture is worth a thousand words” and it is used to describe how well, how efficiently, it communicates. But it also reveals the problem: That one single image can contain and convey a ton of different meanings, making it easy to manipulate, appropriate and skew its original value. When we project the selected footage onto the screen, it represents an attempt to show it as raw as possible – straight from the hard drive. There were 12,756 clips in total on there, and they are part of an open archive project at Birmingham City University; a refugee archive. And of course it is painful and difficult to watch but I think it is the role of the filmmakers and artists to speak about this collective memory, and to give it another dimension. With that being said, I don’t want to minimize the emotional work that goes into that transformation. Rami definitely had trauma from going through all that footage - even though he was not the one filming and ‘only’ witnessed it second hand.

INTERVIEWER: How did you work through that? What has it been like for you to make this film?

RAMI: It has been, and still is, very heavy. Like Yadan says at one point in the film, as soon as you have a camera in your hand, or you are working on documenting the brutality, people expect you to be made of stone. But of course the truth is that, on the inside, you are just as devastated as they are. And yes, going over the footage has caused me many nightmares. Especially the clip where huge chunks of ice are cooling down the body of a young guy in a kind of container while his blood is draining out of the bottom. That image is etched on my mind. But this is how I see it: There are two kinds of trauma. And two related kinds of suffering. In Arabic, we have this expression: if someone has their eyes open when they die, it is because they had something they didn’t get to finish, or someone they didn’t get to say goodbye to. If their eyes are shut, they have closure and can rest in peace. And for me personally, this illustrates quite well how you can experience something horrible but still find some level of peace if you get a chance to talk about it, understand it, put it to rest. Take my nightmare for example. The guy in the ice. For the people who were there, it was awful to witness his death. But they buried him and said goodbye. Me? Because I did not know what happened to him, I was stuck in that ice with him for years. What continues to traumatize and haunt people, I believe, is when there is no closure, which explains why it is so hard to deal with the many people who ”forcibly disappear”. Like my friend Bassel Safadi (Bassel Khartabil is his real name, Safadi was an online alias referring to where he was born, red.) did, who was one of the most important people of the revolution because he basically created the open-source software that made it possible for us to communicate online without being detected by the security forces. So yes, of course watching the clips is hard - and some of the memories the activists refused to relive. But it also brings closure, which is healing, so the confrontation comes from a place of caring. In this perspective, I think it was good that the film ended up taking so long to make. Without a substantial amount of time to process what happened, and gain some distance to it, we probably wouldn’t have been ready to talk about it, much less reach the same level of reflection.

INTERVIEWER: What do you want to say with this film and which conversations do you wish to start?

LYANA: I hope that this film will start a discussion among Syrians about what has happened and that it will remind people outside of Syria that the war is not over. Right now, we are seeing a lot of focus on Syria, which is great, but the problem with these 10-year anniversary “retrospectives” is that they also make it seem like a thing of the past although, for the people in Syria, it is still very much their present. The same regime that has driven 6 million people out of the country, and displaced 6 million more, is still in power. The war is not over because, at the root, nothing has changed. There may be less bombing but the people are no more free; they are still being detained and tortured. And for Rami, it has always been crucial to document. To focus on the personal consequences of openly opposing the regime. First with Fares Helou, who was at the center of his previous film, and with Yadan, Odai, and Rani now. But where ‘A Comedian in a Syrian Tragedy’ was Rami in the process of surrendering to his fate in exile, this is him making a statement.

INTERVIEWER: And what statement is that?

RAMI: That we are not done. That we continue to fight from exile for a freer Syria and for the regime to be held accountable for their war crimes. That we are currently summoning all our human archives and digital records to fight back and to set the record straight: to show that the demonstrations against the regime back in 2011 were peaceful until the regime started attacking its own people. That citizen journalists like Yadan, Odai, and Rani have been risking their lives for years trying to reach out to an international community that failed them. That calling what happened in Syria “a Civil War” is not just wrong but a way of evading responsibility. That Syrians are not safe as long as the regime’s allies and secret police could be living in the same building as them. Not in Damascus, not anywhere. I am aware that Denmark has recently taken away 94 Syrian refugees’ residency permits, arguing that Damascus is safe enough for them to return to. And I don’t understand how they could, when the same people who drove Syrians out, are still in power. Until that changes, no one wants to go back. And the ones who are still there, only think about escaping.

LYANA: One of the things that we really need to understand now, especially in Europe, is that this narrative, what Rami just said, is of course not the official narrative in Syria. Today in Syria and Egypt people still cannot talk freely about the revolutions. Certain terms are simply forbidden. They are being erased while we speak and replaced with official narratives. In exile, we can talk about it freely - but in language that is not ours. In Daraa the statue of Hafez Assad, which we saw being torn down in the film, has now been put back up again in the exact same square. In a strange way, it makes even the victory of having made this film and the joy of finally being able to share it, feel a bit stolen.

RAMI: With this film, we are trying to take back some level of control over how The Syrian Revolution will be remembered, and what version of the story our kids will hear. Otherwise who knows, maybe in ten or twenty years, the new generation of Syrians would never even hear about what really happened. They would just hear the version of the regime; that there was a war because some gangsters tried to over-throw the regime. It is our duty now to keep our memory of the revolution alive and to pass it on to future generations.