Abounaddara

I had the good fortune to interview the Abounaddara film collective about their work in Syria. This is an anonymous, underground group of self-taught filmmakers—the majority of whose members are women—that has managed to capture the social and human dimensions of war with an intimacy that is almost never seen in any conflict, let alone in Syria today. Abounaddara releases a new video every Friday on Vimeo.

The films are very powerful. As I write in my piece, we don’t discover the comfortable notion of life-affirming art in their films. Watching the videos, we instead realize the fundamental fragility of this thing we pompously call human society.

I spoke to their official spokesman, Charif Kiwan, in New York City. This piece was published on The Nation‘s website, and can be found here.