Syria Justice (working title)

Justice is universal, but it can also be personal. After more than a decade of brutal mass killings, torture, siege, detention, and forced disappearances, Syrian activists and lawyers are leading the challenge to bring the Bashar Al-Assad regime to justice.

In 2011, the Arab Spring came to Syria as citizens took to the streets demanding democracy, freedom, and justice after decades of oppression. This peaceful uprising turned into a massive war of repression, during which heinous crimes were committed by the Syrian government forces and its allies against the Syrian people. 

Syria Justice is a character-driven vérité film that follows survivors and prosecutors as they gather evidence of these crimes in order to bring the Syrian government to justice for its actions. The film’s story is told through the journey that each piece of evidence must take as it winds its way from the streets of exploding cities and the underground torture chambers of Syrian security agencies to bureaucratic European courtrooms where the drama of these cases plays out. 

Digital pixels, the visual residue of a massacre, are rescued from a perpetrator’s computer by a young Syrian; signed authorizations for torture are snatched from a storeroom by a brave activist; and thumb drives are smuggled across the border. Then, picking up the journey, journalists and human rights researchers sift through this precious detritus; lawyers evaluate them, and eventually these words and images come to rest in a prosecutor’s court case. 

Our guide through this story is Bassam Khabieh, an award-winning photojournalist who covered the war for a decade while trapped in Douma, Syria, before fleeing with his family to Turkey and, eventually, England. SYRIA JUSTICE takes us from the intimate stories of survivors and victims to high-stakes prosecution on an international stage, examining justice through a personal and universal lens.

The film is currently in production. Research was conducted in late 2021 and throughout 2022 and 2023. We have established our main themes and identified our lead protagonists and crew and created strong relationships with expert advisors. We are following and filming court cases, as well as documenting the groundbreaking research and investigations of our protagonists. We project a release in 2026.