THE DARAA ARCHIVE
AND THE SYRIAN ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

When the conversations first started between the film crew and Yadan Draji, Syrians were still protesting in the streets, calling for freedom and political reform. The Daraa archive then had a testimonial – ‘We are here, and this is happening to us’, and an evidential – ‘Look how the Syrian regime is repressing our peaceful movement’ value.

Today, as we commemorate the tenth anniversary of the uprising, the Daraa archive sits within a wider collective narrative, alongside millions of other crowd-sourced videos filmed by Syrian archivists – a narrative of memory, and arguably history.

The Daraa archive is today part of a developing research project at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research which brings together civil society groups, researchers, activists and archivists from Syria and the North Africa Western Asia region.

The project will document the experiences of a number of Syrian image-makers from Damascus, Daraa, Hama, Homs, Aleppo and Raqqa, through a series of in-depth interviews, as a way to make space, in a public Oral History Database, for their voices and subjectivities. In addition to inspiring this project, the Daraa archive, and the voices you will hear in this film, form the cornerstone of the open database.

- Dima Saber