Oscar Nominated Syrian Director Feras Fayyad On The Ouster Of Assad

EXCLUSIVE: Through a popular uprising and a long and hideous civil war, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime tottered at times, but held on, propped up by allies Russia and Iran. But filmmaker Feras Fayyad, who endured torture in Assad’s prisons, never gave up the certainty that one day the dictator would be ousted.

“I believed in that,” he tells Deadline. “The world has been through so many times of rising dictatorship and genocide, but in general there was an end to them, all of them. There’s no way that they will go on like this [indefinitely].”

The fateful day for Assad came in early December, when rebel forces entered Damascus, and the dictator hightailed it to Moscow and the embrace of his patrons at the Kremlin. He left without so much as a goodbye to his supporters.

“This was the most important [truth] for the people that was supporting him and standing behind him to understand — that this coward will leave them alone,” Fayyad observes. “And he left them alone, naked, without any power… He was lying and lying and lying to the last moment, the last second, lying to them [that he wouldn’t flee] and they deeply believed in his lies… Of course, for a lot of them it was like a shock, an earthquake under their feet and they have to process this faster than any normal human can do.”

The collapse of the Assad regime abruptly threw open the doors to prisons where thousands of perceived enemies of his rule had been detained, tortured or disappeared. Fayyad was arrested by government agents in 2011 and tossed into one of those communal cells, accused of espionage and of other anti-government activities. There, a Syrian army colonel named Anwar Raslan subjected Fayyad to unspeakable violence, sexually assaulting him with a wooden baton.

“At that moment, I feel my mind is spilled inside… it’s like a kind of coma feeling,” he says. “There’s a group of people on top of me laughing and mocking and threatening me.”

In 2014, Raslan was arrested in Germany and accused of 4,000 counts of torture, and 58 counts of murder, rape, and “serious sexual assault.” German authorities prosecuted him under the concept of universal jurisdiction for crimes against humanity, and they sought Fayad’s testimony in their case. In 2020, the filmmaker thus came face to face in court with his torturer.

“There is something strange about the meaning of justice in that moment, to stand in front of a person who is involved in your torture and tortured so many other people. He destroys something that can’t be fixed in a way,” Fayyad recalls. “He was staring at me and tried to affect me with his way of looking at me. All other witnesses, actually, he tried to affect psychologically in that way.”

Raslan’s tactic didn’t work. He was convicted in 2022 and sentenced to life in prison.

“The only victim of ‘serious sexual assault’ was my testimony,” Fayyad notes. “And the prosecutor said my testimony was one of the main reasons to lead to the [guilty] verdict.”

Fayyad has earned two Academy Awards for his documentaries on Syria. He is at work on two more films now including one that he describes as “the third film from my trilogy about Syria, which started with Last Men in Aleppo and The Cave.” That third documentary, which he began shooting in 2018, focuses on a pair of married lawyers who worked inside Syria, struggling to establish a semblance of the rule of law under Assad’s dictatorial rule.

“I capture all these developments from Covid to the earthquake [of February 2023], how it impacted their work, how their work impacts the society, what they can do for their society in this way, how these two lawyers as a family work and function together,” he explains. “One of her main missions was trying to get death certificates for women whose husbands have been disappeared — because the Syrian regime system is built on disappearing the men and all inheritance rights of the woman is connected to that disappearance. If she doesn’t get the death certificate, she cannot travel, she cannot bring her child with her if she travels, she cannot get aid. She’s not considered anything without that certificate in the end. And that’s how the regime controlled society – by disappearing men, women [left behind] also stayed controlled, society completely controlled.”

“She’s challenging the whole legal system,” Fayyad says of his co-protagonist. “And her husband, who’s a lawyer, tries also to investigate the torture system, the system that disappeared those men, trying to figure out how we can document [whether] they’re dead or alive. In this way, their work supports each other… [The story arc] gives us a view since 2018 into Syria and beyond, until now.”

The second film Fayyad is working on will be intensely personal – exploring what he went through as a prisoner of the Assad regime. Of his fellow political prisoners he says, “Some of them they killed under torture, some of them went out completely destroyed. I was one of them.”

The film will partly use animation to describe his experience and what he describes as an uplifting element to the story — how therapy helped him heal emotionally. “Like 80 percent of it is animation and 20 percent is real footage,” he tells Deadline.

The fall of Assad has opened up the possibility of bringing a camera to document the very place where he suffered terrible abuse.

“I need to go and film myself inside this torture facility, in my cell, film those documents [investigative files on him],” he says. “Already, I filmed a couple of documents without being there, but soon I’ll continue collecting more evidence and more files.”

He adds that for him, the film must be “more a cinematic journey because I don’t want to put my movie in a journalistic perspective, keep it more like observational in a way so people can go with me on a journey. It shouldn’t be just about me. It’s more representation for a society, for coming of age, for the change and the history and how you can grow up under the silence kingdom… how we can speak up, how we can also use the silence as a way of language to communicate and use it against the Syrian regime.”

Fayyad is raising his daughter in Berlin, where he now lives. “I haven’t been in Syria since the overthrow and I was thinking many times to travel,” he comments. “I wanted to travel but I wanted to hold on because I need some time to process… In the end, I’m an artist and filmmaker and I’m not a politician and I’m not a human rights activist leading an NGO who has to be there and leave everything and go there. I would prefer to settle down this emotion and collect myself and then go.”

The new Syrian government faces enormous challenges unifying the country.

“Security forces of Syria’s new rulers have engaged in heavy fighting with fighters loyal to deposed President Bashar al-Assad in a coastal area of the country,” the BBC reported earlier in March. “It is the worst violence in Syria since rebels toppled Assad in December and installed an Islamist transitional government.”

The filmmaker expresses deep concern about the Islamist government that is now in charge of Syria. Yet, he joins many Syrians both inside and outside the country who harbor a sense of hope after Assad’s ouster.

“It is a kind of spring breeze,” he says. “It is really like you were in a middle of deep winter, difficult winter with the snow and rain, harsh rain, harsh snow that you cannot see because the size of the disaster, the natural disaster that’s made by the weather and then suddenly all of that as that season of spring coming and touch your face, touch your hair, move it around you and you feel like the flowers start to and you start to see things around, you realize things in this way.“

Fayyad adds, “Of course, not everything is flowers, but you can see that you can build on the spring, a summer in a way, hopefully not harsh summer. Hopefully, you can make this spring last for long. And this is what I can call it — spring.”