Syria: Snapshots of History in the Making

Abounaddara (“the man with the movie camera”) is an anonymous documentary film collective formed in Damascus in 2010 in search of a renewed art of the moving image, one independent from state-controlled cinema and inspired by the imaginative work of the traditional arts of the region. When the members turned to filming the revolution, this vision came to shape the more than three hundred shorts Abounaddara made and produced between 2011 and 2017, which were posted on the internet every Friday. The unique aesthetics of the videos, which are laconic and surprising, utilizes a specific mode of depicting violence, where images struggle against dehumanization. The filmmakers sometimes describe their style as utopian realism: depicting fragments of daily life and people in dialogue among and with themselves, their films comprise an intimate diary of a society undergoing transformation in a time of revolution and war. Syria: Snapshots of History in the Making is assembled from videos made during the first years of the conflict.