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In new movie ‘Cries from Syria,’ an eerily timely riposte to the Donald Trump ban

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On Friday, just a few hours before Donald Trump would announce an executive action banning many residents of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S., the filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky was engaging in a different sort of governmental interaction.

Afineevsky was at a Salt Lake City science museum screening his new film, “Cries from Syria,” for Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams and other local officials. The film offers a detailed and devastating account of the civil war that has gripped the country for more than five years, and its director was on a mission — he wanted the images of brutality to serve as a wake-up call for supporters of exactly the kinds of policies undertaken by the new president.

FULL COVERAGE: Sundance Film Festival »

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“As soon as it’s seen, it open minds and hearts — these are human beings that have families,” Afineevsky said in an interview. “This movie can be a tool in helping people understand.” McAdams, a Democrat, later said his jurisdiction would not enforce Trump’s ban.

You can talk to a lot of artists about repression. Few have the experience that Afineevsky does.

The 44-year-old filmmaker, who now makes his home in Los Angeles, was born in the U.S.S.R. circa 1972. He spent the first 18 years of his life under Soviet rule, in the Muslim-majority republic of Tatarstan. He left because he felt he couldn’t express himself artistically in his home country, emigrating first to Israel and then to the U.S., where he is now a citizen.

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More recently, though, he’s been toiling much farther away: on the Turkey-Syria border, and sometimes in war-torn Syria itself, with the people who either can’t afford or can’t bring themselves to leave. He’s spent two years there investigating the Syrian civil war for his new movie, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last week ahead of its debut on HBO in March.

“People need to hear these stories. But the world is silent,” Afineevsky said, speaking in the incongruous precincts of this picturesque resort town.

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“The obligation is for filmmakers to take the accounts of those no longer with us and bring them to people. It’s depressing to read the news,” he added. “Nobody wants to educate themselves. I want to tell a comprehensive story the audience needs to hear.”

Afineevsky is certainly well-positioned to convey what’s happening in the most volatile — and, as the events of the last few days make clear, sometimes most misunderstood — country in the Middle East. At a time when many in Hollywood are countering the Trump ban with statements and speeches—witness the comments at the SAG Awards by actors from “Stranger Things,” “Moonlight” and “Hidden Figures” Sunday night—his movie offers a more tangible response. There is value in public pronouncements, which can elicit hot and even necessary reactions on social media. But with his new work, the Russian-American director proves that the most enduring way for entertainers to challenge undesirable policies is to make art about it.

“Cries from Syria” shows, via both direct interviews with a range of Syrian people and voluminous images from citizen journalists, the ordinary folks caught in the war between Bashar Assad’s military, the Free Syrian Army, the Syrian Democratic Forces and various jihadi groups — a conflict that has claimed as many as 470,000 lives and still rages on.

Screening for the first time just days before Trump’s executive action, the film serves as a kind of humanist response to the president’s ban. To those who say such measures are needed to stop terrorism, the film powerfully and often graphically shows what many of these so-called threats are: victims themselves.

In one scene, a father is seen trying to save his children on a rickety boat in the Mediterranean as, one by one, they slip through his hands and drown.

In another, a school is under an aerial attack — a tragedy remembered only because a young boy and his cousin were allowed to leave after sitting more quietly than anyone in the class. By the time they arrive home, the entire school has been razed by a missile, scores of their classmates killed.

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In perhaps the most horrific scene, dozens of children are killed in a chemical raid by Assad’s army — an event portrayed with startling explicitness.

Afineevsky, who documented the 2014 Ukrainian revolution from the ground in his previous film, “Winter On Fire” (it was nominated for the documentary Oscar), has again gone deep to show a side of a conflict most mainstream journalism institutions lack either the resources or fortitude to chronicle.

“Cries from Syria” is thus more than a journalistic snapshot; it’s a definitive document of one of the most bloody of modern conflicts. What it lacks in easy digestibility — images such as the gassing make this one of the most difficult documentaries to watch in recent memory — it compensates for with historical importance. When, years from now, in a bid to understand or administer self-blame, the world looks back at the Syrian civil war, it’s movies like this that will pinpoint most clearly what happened, told by the people to whom it was happening.

“People say, ‘Why did you show so much?’” Afineevsky said, referencing some murmurs at the festival that the film can be hard to watch, in particular because of all the images of children. “But you have to show it to understand what happened. Otherwise it’s just an abstraction, something on the news.”

Viewers might be moved by the stories of many of the adults too. Among the most powerful is Kholoud Helmi, a resident of Darayya, a suburb of Damascus. Helmi talks movingly, in fluent English, about the suffering she witnesses and the changes she’d like to see.

Even less personal moments land with a visceral power: as an animated map indicating where chemical weapons have fallen begins to unnervingly fill up, for instance, as an unseen man sings plaintively, driving home the tragedy.

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And if the film is often told from the perspective of supporters of the Free Syrian Army — they comprise many of the interviews — it also is interested in victims far more than fighters. When children make up a disproportionate amount of the film, thoughts about politics can fall away; among the many haunting images is a young boy nonchalantly drawing a picture of the various armies closing in around his town the way most children crayon their handprint or the family pet.

(Two other movies about the region, “City of Ghosts” and “Last Men in Aleppo,” also premiered at Sundance, completing a kind of trilogy of war horror. The former, about citizen journalists behind the groundbreaking Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently Facebook page comes from a different Oscar nominee, “Cartel Land” director Matthew Heineman; encountering the heroic subjects at a festival party was one of the most chilling-but-inspiring experiences this reporter has ever had at Sundance. The latter, meanwhile, takes a more focused look at the White Helmets, the war’s bold rescue group, and won a documentary prize Saturday night.)

The message of Syria movies should not be limited to far-flung places, Afineevsky said.

“These people start with a dream they’ve never had, of democracy. They’ve never had free speech,” said the director, who with a thick beard, tousled salt and pepper hair and intense way of speaking projects a moral seriousness above his outgoing demeanor. “And we have all of that in the U.S. But we should cherish it. There were states last week that wanted to ban protests. The idea that this could only happen in a place like Syria is not true,” he added. “I want people in America to see this movie and appreciate what we have. We have to cherish it so we can fight for what we have.”

Afineevsky hopes to show “Cries from Syria” to wide swaths of this nation’s capital, including to members of the Trump administration, before its cable debut.

He says he strongly opposes Trump’s executive action restricting entry from countries including Syria, not only on humanitarian grounds but pragmatic ones. “Trump is making a mistake if he thinks closing the border will prevent things. At the end of the day we’re talking about a lot of kids. And if we don’t help them and provide shelter, [Islamic State] will be their only shelter.”

He noted that Syrians make up barely a quarter of the refugees that come to the U.S., and also noted that this was the wrong way to neutralize a threat for other reasons.

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“It’s not 20 or 30 years ago where you can shut doors and prevent terrorism,” he said. “It doesn’t work that way. There are people who live here who follow [Islamic State’s] ideology. It has very little to do with Syrians. Syrians are the ones suffering the most from terrorism.”

But he also retains optimism that the White House will see his film and keep an open mind.

“I’m targeting everybody,” he said. “Almost every senator has kids or grandkids. Same with Donald Trump — he has a wife and kids and grandkids. Mike Pence has a wife and kids. We need to remind them all these people [caught in the Syrian civil war] have wives or kids, or are wives and kids.”

For the moment, one can be forgiven for seeing reasons to lose hope. Helmi had come to the U.S. to promote the movie at Sundance. She made appearances at screenings, speaking to audiences eager to hear her story firsthand. She set out on Wednesday to return to her temporary home on the Turkish side of the Turkish-Syria border, where she has lived since fleeing Darayya. When she boarded a plane at Salt Lake City International Airport, Helmi believed she’d be returning to the U.S. in about eight weeks for the next round of publicity, including the HBO premiere. The ban has now thrown that into doubt.

“There are a lot of questions right now. Will she be able to travel to our country? Will she be able to talk about this important story?” Afineevsky said.

Asked about her state of mind, the director pulled no punches.

“She was devastated,” he said, noting he had spoken to her this past weekend after the ban was announced. “This movie was hope for her, hope for a lot of families that were coming to Utah.” (The state has been hospitable to refugees, with an estimated 60,000 from Syria and elsewhere currently living here.)

But Afineevsky said he refuses to give in. “It’s a dream slowly. These people have hope, I still have hope. We want to be able to change something in our country too.”

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Late in his movie, that central tension — between optimism and despair, belief and doubt — is given expression by several subjects. Besieged by years of death and displacement, one shaken Syrian civilian says, “I cannot imagine how a person does this to another person,” adding, “For Syrians I think it becomes normal. It will never be normal but it becomes like daily things you see.”

Another is more bright-eyed. “We want to see a more beautiful Syria so we are working on rebuilding it. Our big dream is to see our country more beautiful. Our dream is to end this war.”

But hovering over them are more grim realities. As one person talks about using music to ease the pain, another offers a tart response. “With such brutality,” they say, “it is not enough just to sing.”

See the most-read stories in Entertainment this hour »

steve.zeitchik@latimes.com

Twitter: @ZeitchikLAT

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