ewsba.se
In the early, optimistic days of the Syrian revolution, a law student named Hasan Kattan joined a small group of activists in Aleppo who risked their lives to document atrocities that were being carried out by security forces loyal to the then President, Bashar al-Assad. The work exposed Kattan to astonishing violence, often in the form of indiscriminate attacks from above—air strikes, shelling, barrel bombs chucked out of helicopters onto markets and houses. It was not unusual, in the aftermath of an attack, for regime jets to circle back and strike again, to kill or maim anyone who was trying to pull the wounded out of the rubble. Kattan filmed such horrors and posted them online, hoping that the world might pay attention. It was through this terrible work that he met Fadi al-Halabi, another young man with the same documentary impulse and ambitions. They became inseparable friends.
View the latest or submit your own film.
The war dragged on. Kattan was nearly shot by a sniper; Halabi and his brother Yaman, who also worked as an activist, were nearly buried in an air strike on an underground hospital that was treating victims of a chemical attack. When Assad’s forces looked weak, Russia sent ground troops and fighter jets to support them. The rebel-held half of Aleppo—one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world—became a bombed-out wasteland. By the end of 2016, the remaining opposition-controlled neighborhoods were encircled. Halabi escaped, under bombardment; Kattan, who had recently married, sent his wife to the Turkish border area with a group of other women, then followed, by himself, during the final days of the siege. “All I carried out of Aleppo was our footage, the memory of a city that must never be forgotten,” he later said. So began a life of displacement—first in northern Syria, then in southern Turkey.
In the early hours of February 6, 2023, a devastating earthquake shook the ground in the Turkish-Syrian border areas. Many buildings collapsed, crushing to death people who had recently fled war. Kattan’s wife and two small children survived, but, in the hours after the earthquake, Halabi couldn’t find anyone in his family; he was missing fourteen close relatives in all, including his parents and Yaman. Kattan picked up a camera and filmed his best friend’s dwindling hope, as emergency workers dug through the rubble of the buildings where they had lived, searching for survivors and finding none.
A year later, Kattan and Halabi were invited to show the resulting film, “Death Without Mercy,” which documented Halabi’s desperate search for his loved ones, at a private screening in London. But anti-Syrian sentiment was on the rise in Turkey, and, as they went through the airport in Istanbul, a Turkish immigration official instructed them to sign a document that they soon realized amounted to a ban on their return. “It looked like a routine administrative procedure that we had to complete before being allowed to continue our journey,” Kattan told me.
The men arrived in London, afraid and confused. Halabi had no family and nowhere to go; Kattan’s wife and children were still in Turkey. Neither man could return to Syria—it was early 2024, and Assad was still in power. After consulting a lawyer in London, both men applied for asylum in the U.K.
The two friends shared a room in a hotel for asylum seekers, waiting for appointments that would decide their fates. Neither had wanted to leave Syria, or Turkey, but once again they had ended up in exile, stranded amid circumstances that were beyond their control. Kattan turned to the camera, to document whatever might follow. The footage would eventually become the basis for his film “Allies in Exile,” which was co-directed by Halabi. The days came and went—a hundred days, two hundred, three hundred. Anti-immigrant protests took place outside. “Nothing is harder than the wait—a silence that brings out every memory,” Kattan said.
Then, in early December, 2024, rebel forces overran the Syrian capital, Damascus. Assad fled to Russia in the dead of night. The war was over. For Kattan and Halabi, the celebration was bittersweet. “If Bashar al-Assad had stepped down at the start, my family would have stayed in Aleppo, and I would not have lost them,” Halabi said. “They would have been the people who helped rebuild Syria.”
This film is produced by Orlando von Einsiedel and supported by the Displacement Film Fund. The D.F.F. is co-founded and led by Cate Blanchett and was established with fellow-supporters to champion and to fund the work of displaced filmmakers. International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund is the management partner, and other partners include Master Mind, UNIQLO, Droom en Daad, the Tamer Family Foundation, the Amahoro Coalition, U.N.H.C.R., and the SP Lohia Foundation.