The members of Abounaddara have lost track of the number of videos they've created. Vimeo says 370, but that doesn’t account for the hours of footage that never sees the light of day.
For the sake of clarity, though, let’s say it’s 370. That’s one video uploaded almost every Friday since 2011---a schedule that the anonymous Syrian filmmaking collective has adhered to despite working in one of the world's most volatile countries.
Each week, the collective posts a video and waits for people to watch. And people do watch, often in modest numbers, as Abounaddara unspools quiet stories of little interest to mainstream media. The collective’s mini documentaries, which typically range from one to five minutes, are shocking and powerful in their subtlety and subject matter. They inhabit a world between art and journalism, and in the age of 24/7 news and Facebook algorithms, they’re the opposite of viral content---intimate, principled, quotidian, and usually free of violence.
Last Friday, Abounaddara released its most recent film, *Isis. *Like those before it, the video was a low production affair: Four minutes of a shadowy figure addressing the camera. The man, whose identity is not revealed, recounts in a matter-of-fact tone his arrest and time spent in an ISIS detention center. “I wasn’t beaten during the arrest; I was relatively well treated,” he says. “They destroyed my narghiles and cigarettes, but on the whole they were decent.”
“What he’s saying is quite balanced,” says Charif Kiwan, the only vocal member of Abounaddara. “If we really want to understand the enemy, we have to listen to people who aren’t stereotyped victims.” Abounaddara has held to the belief that we have much to learn from paying attention to Syrians who receive little attention since it began producing films five years ago.
The collective began shooting before the uprising against president Bashar al-Assad erupted in the spring of 2011. Its first series of 12 films, which chronicled the daily life of workers and artisans in Syria, attempted to "prove to the media that we can make heroes with nothing," Kiwan says. That ethos, which threads its way through all of the collective's films, has been well received. Human Rights Watch recognized Abounaddara's work last year, and it has been honored by the Sundance Film Festival and Vera List Center for Arts and Politics.
For as long as Abounaddara has been producing documentaries, the government has tightly controlled the cinema. “If you were making films in Syria you either worked underground or you were associated with the state, which made for a certain style of filmmaking,” says Andrea Holley, director of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. Telling the stories of Syria fell to state-run TV and foreign media, both of which Abounaddara believes promote an oversimplified image of Syrian people as being violent or victims. “Look, we are one of the youngest societies in the world,” Kiwan says. “We have a huge problem of misrepresentation.”
Abounaddara creates work that runs counter to what it sees as a victim/violence caricature, though the films tend to vary, stylistically; footage comes from an undisclosed number of core contributors, but anyone who wants to contribute can do so. In one recent film, Return of the Son, a shaky camera pulls in tight on a woman and her grandson as she’s making dinner and recounting the death of her son. Another film reappropriates YouTube footage to create a collage. All are brashly honest yet somehow gentle. It is, in many ways, an Internet-enabled form of counter-propaganda.
For that reason, most of the production is kept secret. The collective is meant to feel like it's everyone and everywhere. "The idea is to create a space where we can escape any control," Kiwan says. "To empower our civil society so it could produce its own image, independently of any power system." Abounaddara is very much a product of the internet---it couldn’t exist with so little outside reliance on another platform.
"In some ways they’re using the platform that makes the most sense for them," Holley says. The collective is bound by geographical, production and security restraints, which makes the web both financially and logistically the tool that makes the most sense. "But in other ways it is not the most strategic platform, if what you’re trying to do is reframe the discussion of Syria."
Five years into making Internet documentaries, the members of Abounaddara are starting to feel fatigued. At the beginning, it was easy to enlist people to shoot footage and edit. Now people are tired. They're depressed after so much loss. Still, Kiwan says, this is the reason to go on. They must remind people around the world of the humanity behind the headlines, people not so different from you and me. “Sometimes we ask ourselves: Is it worth it? Why are we doing this?” he says. “But we cannot stop. If we stop, we are done. So we keep making films, just because we have to prove to ourselves that there’s something to do.”
