After 14 years of struggle, the Syrian opposition marched from Idlib through Aleppo to capture the capital city, Damascus, effectively ending the more than five-decade-long dictatorship of the Assad dynasty. For Syrians, the struggle has been bloody and traumatic, with millions losing their lives and displaced from their home country. Now, weeks after the criminal flight of the last dictator, Bashar Assad, as well as his backers and supporters, from the country, those who survived the war are returning to their hometowns and villages. As they search through the ruins of the neighborhoods and torture centers for the dead and disappear, we are getting a glimpse of the real magnitude of the devastation. It is clear that the scars of the war will take generations to heal.
In wars like these, where numerous contenders and proxies, mainly supported and sponsored by Western powers, Russia and Iran, vie for influence, the details of the ordinary people’s struggles, sacrifices and resilience remain unknown. Art plays a crucial role in apprehending the actual human toll of war. It helps us to capture the material and psychological destruction, dehumanization of everyday life, and disruption of familial and personal lives.
A Turkish film, "Flaşbellek" ("Flash Drive"), directed by Derviş Zaim in 2020, is one such piece of art that captures the cost of brutality inflicted by the Assad regime’s forces on the country’s people. This art film chronicles the struggle of Syrians throughout the war by focusing on a family that fights its way to escape the war and expose the crimes of the regime. By putting the couple, Ahmet (Saleh Bakri) and Leyla (Sara El Debuch), at the center of the narrative, the film demonstrates humans’ capacity for survival through patience and struggle. Through its aesthetic strategies and creative usage of iconography and metaphors, the film showcases how the struggle – marked by hope and resilience – supersedes the convolutions of the war.
The film captures three of the most striking themes that characterized the Syrian war: the dehumanization of people, the resultant ‘economics of flesh,’ and the resilience of people. When the people rise against the dictatorial regime of Bashar Assad, his armed forces, which include men in uniform and other armed gangs, lead a campaign of repression. While it is known that millions of Syrians were killed during this campaign, the film’s aesthetic treatment captures the mechanics of this dehumanization. For example, the cold-lighted visuals of half-naked bodies of dead men lying on the floor being affixed with tags indicating numbers by men working in the bureaucratic machinery of the ruler; an official from Assad’s administration suffocating a half-conscious man to death instead of sending him for treatment and adding him to the list of dead; tossing of the dead-bodies into the trucks to be carried elsewhere – suggesting a mass-grave or annihilation chamber the reality of which is being revealed now; shooting at men, women and children indiscriminately from the dark as they try to escape the war.
When the kin of the dead try to retrieve their bodies from the regime’s administrators, they face extortion at multiple levels. The film captures the grief of the people whose suffering is compounded when they have to pay hefty amounts to the officials to get hold of the dead bodies of their brothers or sons for a proper funeral. The film allows us to see the meaning of death beyond the numbers in their proper social situation. Another instance of this economics of flesh in the war zone captured by the film is the treatment of women and children at the hands of Daesh terrorists and Ahmet and Leyla saving themselves and the child Ismail from the captivity of Daesh by paying ransom. The group, along with many other terror outfits, hijacked the legitimate movement of the Syrian people against the dictator and imposed a regime of terror across the country. While we have seen the images of Daesh carrying out terrible acts in media, the film conveys the impact of their acts in intimate social and cultural spaces. The film showcases how the fragmentation of control in the country, with multiple terror groups unleashing horrors across different terrains, only enhances the miseries of the countrymen and makes their escape from Assad’s forces even more difficult.
The most significant aspect of the film is the struggle of its two protagonists, Ahmet and Leyla, who are caught in the middle of the war. After witnessing the horrific acts carried out by regime forces, they refuse to be apathetic and decide to go to Türkiye. The journey of these two characters, their transformation from being part of the oppressive system to becoming a source of hope for the oppressed people, reveals the complexities of the war. Evading death in multiple instances, the couple bribes and fights their way to Türkiye.
Their characters and their journey serve as powerful metaphors. Ahmet loses his voice after getting wounded in a military operation while he is part of the regime’s forces. Throughout the film, he remains voiceless, representing the voicelessness of Syrians against the overpowering global discourses. He is assigned to keep records of the dead while working at the government department, which suggests national memory and its echoes for the future. This is where he copies the regime’s official records that detail its crimes to his pen drive to reveal them to the world after reaching Türkiye.
Leyla, a school teacher, loves children and explains to her students the epic folktale of "One Thousand and One Nights." While speaking of the folktale, she tells them, “It teaches us how we can stand up against and resist even death ... how we can conquer all fears.” Even during the war, she wants to conceive a baby. She fights for the child Ismail, whom she encounters during her captivity with Daesh . Her affection for children and stories represents hope for the future of Syria.
Through this ingenious characterization and plotting of the story, the film creates a (Henri) Bergsonian or (Mohammad) Iqbalian confluence of time – an overlap of past, present and future. This should be a message for the dictators around the world: as they oppress people, they are also scripting their own end. Assad’s is the latest example.
Though made four years before, the film succeeds not only in capturing the preceding years of war with ice-cold fidelity but also anticipates the December moment of Syrian struggle when Ahmet and Leyla, after an arduous journey, make it to Türkiye – only to return with a new flag and new future.
