As Syrian strife keeps building (insurgents in Aleppo are now facing air strikes), the government is also waging nonviolent attacks on its critics: Three Syrian filmmakers say that they were fired by the ministry of culture for criticizing the government, and that one of them is considering making a film about the revolution.
Al-Ahram Weekly, which broke the story, named only one of the filmmakers, Ossama Mohammed, who denounced the Syrian government at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. The General Organization for Cinema, which is a department of the Syrian culture ministry, says that Mohammed was fired for absenteeism, since he has not returned to Syria since the Cannes Festival. But Al-Ahram Weekly spoke to several artists who disagreed, saying that the General Organization for Cinema has no attendance requirements and judges directors by their work alone. “I see the ruling regime as an enemy of culture, freedom, and humanity,” Mohammed told the paper. “My dismissal is only a result of the hijacking of Syrian culture by mercenaries.”
According to the website of the Paris mayor’s office, Mohammed is now living there as a political refugee with his wife. He has been awarded a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts and is thinking about making a film on the Syrian revolution that may incorporate footage filmed by ordinary citizens. “There are many images arriving from Syria,” he told the Paris mayor’s office. “The citizens are doing a lot more than the documentary filmmakers.”
“I have an obsession with facing authority,” Mohammed told New Yorker journalist Lawrence Wright in 2006. “This society is responsible for creating the dictatorship — it’s in our culture, our way of believing and thinking. I am trying to expose the authority inside us and the shadow of political authority in front of our doors.” The filmmaker, who was born in 1954, has made only two feature-length films: “Stars in Broad Daylight” (1988) and “Sacrifices,” also known as “The Box of Life” (2002), both of which were critical of the Syrian dictatorship. The films were well-received internationally but ultimately banned by government censors in his home country.
While Mohammed and his peers have lost only their funding, government repression had tragic consequences for another Syrian filmmaker, Bassel Shehade, who was killed during government shelling in Homs in May. After studying in the U.S. on a Fulbright fellowship, Shehade had gone to Homs to make a documentary about the revolution and to train others in filming and editing.
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