Cinematic Looting

Last month, shooting began in Damascus on a film produced by Jackie Chan, using the destroyed suburb of Hajar al-Aswad as a backdrop. On the first day on set, the director, Song Yinxi, was accompanied by the Chinese ambassador to Syria. Flanked by men in military fatigues and a style of Arab dress that looked ever so slightly out of place, a banner in CCP red and gold was hung from a tank turret. ‘Peace and Love,’ it said. Another banner was unfurled above. The English said: ‘Chinese first diplomatic evacuation film “Home Operation” Syria shooting part starts godspeed.’ The more fluent Arabic text said: ‘First Chinese movie begins filming in Syria. Good luck.’ I can’t read the Chinese.

The film is a co-production by China and the United Arab Emirates. China is a longstanding ally of Bashar al-Assad, and the UAE is the first Arab League country to reopen its embassy in Damascus since Syria was expelled from the organisation. As well as being a diplomatic exercise, Home Operation tells the story of one. The film, as its director told assembled journalists, ‘takes the perspective of diplomats who are Communist Party members, who braved a hail of bullets in a war-torn country and safely brought all Chinese compatriots onto one of the country’s warships unscathed’.

The war-torn country where the movie is set, however, isn’t Syria but Yemen. In a segment broadcast on BBC Arabic, Rawad Shahin, a Syrian producer working on Home Operation, gestured to the film crew and destruction surrounding him:

battlefields in Syria can be turned into film studios. Gradually, these areas are attracting film producers to come and shoot their films in Syria. Constructing an area like this is very expensive for a movie studio. What you have here is a readymade film set.

Using Syria’s rubble to stand in for Yemen’s, in other words, makes economic sense. A former resident of the neighbourhood, who now lives in a refugee camp, told Al-Monitor: ‘It’s like they are dancing over our bodies.’

This is at least the second time in two years that a town destroyed by Assad’s forces and their allies has been used as a backdrop for a film set in another of the region’s recent conflicts. The Lebanese director Ahmad Ghossein used Zabadani, once a middle-class summer resort town near the Lebanese border, for a film set in South Lebanon during the 2006 Israeli invasion. But Zabadani had been besieged and destroyed by Hizbullah in 2012, while Ghossein’s film was about a war in which Hizbullah had been the victims of aggression.

Dozens of displaced Syrian filmmakers signed an open letter denouncing the ‘increasingly common’ practice of turning Syrian rubble into ‘décor’. They described it as an act of ‘cinematic looting’ and compared it to the practice of ta‘feesh, furnishing your house with plunder from displaced populations’ homes.

They had other concerns, too. Battlefield images taken with smartphones or digital cameras and circulated on social media have been scoured by activists, journalists and digital investigators such as Bellingcat to prove reports of war crimes, chemical weapon attacks and human rights abuses. These sites, the letter suggested, are effectively active crime scenes, and shooting a feature film on them amounts to tampering with evidence. A few kilometres away, in the suburb of Tadamon, a video file helped uncover a previously undocumented massacre of 41 civilians in 2013 by an Assadist militia. Earlier this year, two academics were able to contact the perpetrator online and document his confession.

For years, the Assad regime has dismissed the millions of clips containing evidence of its crimes as ‘fake news’ or a ‘media conspiracy’. It’s now renting out the rubble it created as a movie set, but it used claim that footage of this devastation was somehow staged in a film studio in Qatar.

Historians and sociologists of science often theorise the way modernity has entailed a transfer of trust from teller to technology. But the transfer is never complete; no innovation ever has the last word. The Assad regime and its allies made a concerted effort to discredit the GoPro footage of the aerial bombardment of civilian neighbourhoods taken by the Syrian Civil Defence (or White Helmets), labelling them as terrorists. In one instance, the Russian Embassy in South Africa tweeted an image supposedly showing the White Helmets setting up a fake shoot. In fact, the image was a still from a Syrian government propaganda film – a mise en abyme of fake news.

Hajar al-Aswad, where the Chinese blockbuster is being shot, was once controlled by Islamic State. The Syrian authorities are unlikely to have chosen it by chance. Their official narrative has been nothing if not consistent. They’ve long claimed that what has happened in Syria since 2011 is in part a Western conspiracy and in part an episode in the global War on Terror, pitting a secular state against an atavistic population of religious extremists. Hajar al-Aswad helps them tell that story.

But Hajar al-Aswad is also bordered by the Palestinian camp of Yarmouk, once widely known as the ‘capital of the diaspora’. After being subjected to lengthy periods of starvation siege by Assad’s forces and their allies, the last surviving Palestinians were bussed out in May 2018 when a local ceasefire was brokered. The history is told in a recent documentary, Our Little Palestine: Diary of a Siege (2021), shot over several years by the young filmmaker Abdallah al-Khatib.

The film isn’t a blockbuster, or a big budget co-production between the UAE and China, and it doesn’t carry a diplomatic message. Instead, it tells a counter-history that doesn’t fit the easy binaries of the War on Terror. It’s the story of the Arab Spring, of a generation of young people who rose up to demand dignity, who tried to resist both the state and the various militias, who used the imperfect tools and technologies available to try to defy both cynicism and despair, and ended up paying the highest price.