Of all the images of violence, destitution, and suffering that I have seen on various screens since October 2023, I still think about one from 10 years ago: A funeral procession carries the corpse of a four-year-old girl who died of starvation in Yarmouk, a Palestinian refugee district in Damascus, Syria. The moment is from Bidayyat’s Little Palestine: Diary of a Siege (2020), a documentary whose excerpts you may have encountered on your Instagram feeds in the last couple of years. One now-viral sequence shows a swarm of young boys peering excitedly at a camera, their delight at being filmed — being in a movie! — belying the heartbreak of their testimonies. “I dream of eating sugar,” says one kid, beaming; “I dream of my father returning,” says another with a shy smile. Yarmouk was placed under a brutal starvation siege by the Assad regime between 2013 and 2015. The director of Little Palestine, a young resident of Yarmouk named Abdallah Al-Khatib, recorded the happenings around him on a video camera. He shaped the footage into a feature film under the tutelage of Bidayyat, a Beirut-based production and distribution hub that, from 2013 to 2023, trained young media activists of the Syrian Revolution in the art of nonfiction filmmaking.
I saw the film in November 2023 at the Montreal International Documentary Festival, where Bidayyat and the American journal World Records hosted a series of screenings and panels. As horrific as the images of death and destruction in Little Palestine are, they didn’t seem unusual then, more than a month into Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, nor were they the most graphic images circulating on screens around me. Yet watching these scenes in a movie as opposed to amputated clips scattered across news and social media pierced me differently. John Berger wrote in 1968 that a war photograph in a newspaper depoliticizes its subject matter: By yanking the reader momentarily from his life, it displaces shock into guilt that he can easily quell by making a donation, if that. In the last two decades, we have surpassed even shock. Images of crises no longer rupture daily life because they are our daily lives. Rather than engendering a feeling of discontinuity, as Berger said of the newspaper photograph, their barrage is so continuous that it resists meaning or specificity. Bidayyat started out right around the time this barrage intensified, in the early days of the Arab Spring, and its members turned to cinema to clear a hermeneutic path through the annihilating flood of images. As was clear at the festival in Montreal, it had important lessons to offer about the stakes of filming and spectating under our new, restless regime of representation.
Images of crises no longer rupture daily life because they are our daily lives.
Scholars like Stefan Tarnowski (who was also a speaker on the panels in Montreal) have noted that the Syrian Civil War was fought as much on the terrain of images as on the ground. During the Assad regime, authorities had maintained tight control over media, often restricting foreign journalists from entering Syria. As the Arab Spring broke out and rippled into Syria, local activists started recording and disseminating their own images, shot on cellphones and video cameras, through social media sites like YouTube or via USB sticks and hard drives smuggled outside of Syria. In 2014, a defector leaked thousands of photographs of the torture inflicted on dissidents in the regime’s secret prisons and detention centers, a dossier that came to be known as the Caesar Report. There were suspicions, too, that the regime itself was releasing material as an intimidation tactic. As the uprising became hijacked by a proxy war between global powers, militias, and, eventually, ISIS, the fight to control the narrative through images intensified.
Around this time, more and more Syrians were pushed into exile in Lebanon, and the city of Beirut became a center for Syrian cultural production. Among the émigrés was Mohammad Ali Atassi, a journalist and filmmaker and the son of Nureddin al-Atassi — Syria’s president before Hafez al-Assad’s coup in 1970. Mohammad Ali Atassi and many of his colleagues were particularly disturbed by the ways in which corporate media exploited the courage of the young people (some of them teenagers) out in the streets, buying footage recorded at great personal risk for peanuts. These images would then circulate as “exclusive” glimpses into the conflict or as appeals to the world’s conscience. The former pandered to voyeurs; the latter to humanitarian viewers all around the world who, for the most part, were powerless to effect significant change. In either case, Syrians’ suffering was instrumentalized for gains that never came back to them. A discourse emerged among Syrian intellectuals and artists about the kind of image making that would preserve the dignity of Syrians and communicate their plight on their own terms.
In 2013, Atassi and several colleagues formed Bidayyat: an organization that sought to teach Syrians how to make documentaries so they could take ownership of their wartime narratives. It was one of several such initiatives in Syria. An anonymous collective called Abounaddara had been active since 2010 with a focus on “emergency cinema,” i.e., cinema rendered as an essential public service akin to health care. They released short, low-budget, and artisanally produced videos weekly via social channels, focusing on the testimonies and acts of resistance of ordinary citizens. According to their bio, their MO was “evoking horror without ever showing it” to “defend the rights of the nameless to a dignified image.” While Bidayyat shared many of Abounaddara’s objectives, it employed a different approach. Its films would be carefully and artfully constructed, professionally edited, and rooted in the filmmaker’s personal vision.
Bidayyat took care to credit directors, allowed them full ownership and control over their images, and encouraged an aesthetic of subjectivity that could counter how news media erased the human elements of the conflict and treated its images as commodities or evidence. Over the years, Bidayyat trained dozens of activists and produced over 50 shorts and eight feature films, many of which — including Little Palestine — traveled to international festivals in Cannes and Venice and won awards. Most of these films unfold like first-person diaries of individuals navigating bombings and sieges, taking up arms, or attempting exile. They are, as Susan Sontag has said of documentary photographs, “both objective record and personal testimony, both a faithful copy or transcription of an actual moment of reality and an interpretation of that reality.”
Unlike photographs, however, which freeze a moment in time, cinema reanimates and reconstitutes time. And unlike activist videos and news media, it involves the deliberative work of meaning-making. Each formal decision — what to include and exclude, how to sequence scenes, where to add or remove sound — dramatically shapes how reality is perceived and interpreted by viewers. The distinctions between amateur image production and cinema might seem inconsequential in our world of 4K iPhone cameras and TikTok series, but in the context of the Syrian uprising, they were politically weighted. In 2014, the renowned Syrian director Ossama Mohammed, in exile in France, premiered a documentary called Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait at the Cannes Film Festival in collaboration with Wiam Simav Bedirxan, a schoolteacher from Homs. The film mixes amateur clips from the Syrian War that the director sourced from the internet — many of them featuring atrocities — with material he shot himself and scenes filmed by Bedirxan during the siege of Homs. The opening sequence cuts between fuzzy glimpses of a newborn being bathed and those of a teenager being sexually assaulted and forced to kiss a boot. On-screen text explains that the adolescent boy was detained and tortured after he scrawled on a wall that people wanted to topple the regime.
The sequence ends with the words: “And there was cinema.” It’s a provocative statement, meant to indicate, perhaps, that the Arab Spring and its camera-armed activists had inaugurated a whole new paradigm of moving images. One could read it as a modern-day riff on Theodor W. Adorno’s famous declaration that writing poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric — an assertion that film, in the wake of such images, can only depict the cruelty of the world. But it also feels misguided in its suggestion that videos shot in the middle of a crisis, whether as acts of cruelty or as tools of survival and self-determination, can be conflated with cinema — a mode of art that is usually made with the luxury of time, resources, and contemplation. By assembling anonymous first-person videos filmed by “1001 ordinary Syrians,” per the prologue of Silvered Water, into a generalized “self-portrait,” the celebrated film to some extent reproduces the depersonalized logic of news media. It is, in large part, a secondhand account, a record of the accumulation of images rather than that of experiences. In contrast, Bidayyat’s productions are documents of experiences (including the experience of documentation itself) that are shaped and narrativized by their very subjects.
The splashy reception of Silvered Water provoked debate in Syria about the circulation of graphic scenes of suffering. For Abounaddara, such images are violent in and of themselves; they dehumanize Syrians for a Western audience that is never represented in the same ways. For Atassi, the circulation of abject images of Syrians also represented a concession to the regime. “Isn’t staring what the perpetrators want?” he wrote in an article for the online Syrian magazine Al-Jumhuriya. But the magazine’s founder, intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh, spoke in defense of the circulation of photographic evidence of the regime’s crimes against Syrians, which extended far beyond what was visually documented. Are such images humiliating “because they were filmed,” he asked in the same publication, “or because those events took place?”
These arguments concerned how images are distributed and consumed: who shows them, who sees them, and to what ends. In the case of Bidayyat, the fact that the films were made by folks who had experienced the realities shown on-screen changed the stakes, often challenging and refining the stances held by Atassi and other Bidayyat mentors. These filmmakers’ ethical negotiations concerned how the image was created — who captured them, for whom, and why. At the festival in Montreal, film editor Qutaiba Barhamji recalled that a workshop trainee was shocked upon learning that his editor had never seen a video of an ISIS beheading. It was commonplace in his own world, both real and mediatized. “You can’t tell them we can’t show images they’ve lived just because it’s hard for others to watch them,” Barhamji said. He also spoke of hitting an impasse when tasked with incorporating Abdallah al-Khatib’s footage of the starvation siege of Yarmouk into another director’s film: He could not figure out how to do it in a manner that felt respectful. Years later, when al-Khatib decided to make his own film and Barhamji came on as the editor, the two were able to craft an appropriate context for those brutal images because al-Khatib was there for all of it, not just as an observer but as a member of a ghastly collective experience, which he narrates in the film in dialogue with his neighbors.
The scene is not in the film because he put down his camera and started helping people.
The 2018 Bidayyat production Still Recording required different considerations. The film comprises footage recorded between 2011 and 2015 by two art students, Ghiath Ayoub and Saeed Al Batal, as young men around them took up arms against Assad’s forces. In 2013, while filming, Al Batal was at the site of the chemical attack in Ghouta that killed over 1,000 people and injured nearly 6,000 more. The scene is not in the film because Al Batal put down his camera and started helping people. He also refused to include footage of the attack shot by comrades. We only see two brief shots that he had taken almost by accident: The first is of a chemical missile arcing in the sky, and the second of some dead chickens on a stained-red ground. The events are conveyed via on-screen text. It’s a strange gap in a film that otherwise establishes how essential it was for Ayoub and Al Batal to film constantly; the camera was his “shield,” Al Batal wrote in an essay for the Bidayyat website. It is the absence that confirms his presence: He could no longer film precisely because he was there.
Al Batal’s essay made me think of Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, which challenges the idea that one has no right to experience the suffering of others from a distance: “There’s nothing wrong with standing back and thinking.” Al Batal, writing from the point of view of a maker rather than a viewer, says, “My lens is the shield that protects me, not from the dangers of detonations, shrapnel and bullets, but from the risk that I might start to think, to despair, to give in.” For those who cannot afford to think while wielding the camera, the process of making cinema offers the distance necessary for thought. Through its project, Bidayyat sought to cultivate that distance, shifting the onus — or perhaps agency — of meaning-making from the faraway spectators of a nearly unrepresentable crisis to its subjects. Their films remind us that images are not mere abstractions or reflections; they are products of embodied and material acts in this world, with embodied and material consequences.
Still Recording drives home this point. The film takes its title from its closing shot, in which Abu Kinan, one of the film’s many videographers, is walking down a street with two rebel fighters when suddenly, a sniper shoots him. The camera falls to the ground. In its skewed frame, we see truncated bodies and legs and hear gunshots and frenzied screams. The camera is still running. It is, more than anything, proof of subjectivity. It is proof that there was a pair of eyes there. There was life.
The author would like to thank Jason Fox, the editor of World Records, for his crucial assistance and input.
Devika Girish is a writer, editor, and curator based in Brooklyn. She is the co-editor of Film Comment magazine and a Talks programmer at the New York Film Festival.
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