In early 2014, the Daesh group entered the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, declaring it their capital and beginning a reign of terror marked by grisly public executions.
Armed police patroled the streets as “enemies” of the regime were crucified or decapitated, their severed heads impaled on spikes in the city square.
Student Abdalaziz Alhamza and his friends decided to form Raqqa is Being Silently Slaughtered (RBSS), a band of courageous citizen journalists who risk their lives to document Daesh atrocities.
Their work is chronicled in “City of Ghosts,” by Oscar-nominated director Matthew Heineman, one of a raft of films on conflict and terror in the Middle East that premiered this week at the annual Sundance Film Festival.
“So often in documentaries, subjects become caricatures of whatever they’re doing in life. For me, that’s not very interesting,” Heineman, 33, told AFP.
“I very much wanted to spend as much time as possible to understand who these guys are, what makes them tick, what are their emotions, feelings and thoughts,” he said.
RBSS documents the atrocities committed daily by the extremists on camera phones, smuggling encrypted footage via the Internet to Alhamza and his fellow exiles, who disseminate it via social media.
Heineman was touring America with his Oscar-nominated 2015 Mexican drug trade documentary “Cartel Land” as the plight of Syrians was becoming a near-daily part of the news cycle.
He began researching the conflict extensively and came across RBSS in the fall of 2015, and was struck by the sacrifices that its members had made.
Heineman followed them in Turkey and then eventually to Germany as the Daesh continued to threaten them.
Heineman’s story starts in Raqqa but evolves into a rare human take on Europe’s migrant crisis, as well as a moving chronicle of brotherhood and coping with trauma.
Elsewhere at Sundance, “Last Men in Aleppo,” a documentary on the Syrian city’s “White Helmet” first responders, also got its premiere.
“Cries from Syria,” a third film on the crisis making its debut, tells how the country’s people, inspired by events in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, rose up against the dictatorial rule of President Bashar Assad.

Source: Arab News