‘The Lost Souls Of Syria’: IDFA Review

Dir: Stéphane Malterre. France/Germany. 2022. 99mins 

In 2013, a former Syrian military photographer, codenamed Caesar, smuggled 27,000 photographs out of his war-torn homeland depicting the corpses of men, women and children tortured and killed in government detention centres. When the photos were made public, they appalled the world and encouraged victims’ families to seek justice. This hard-hitting documentary follows ongoing attempts to hold Syria’s government to account and, while often tough to watch, keeps an essential spotlight on atrocities still being committed there.

 Captures the frustrations of a system that claims to be sympathetic but fails to act

At the time of The Lost Souls of Syria’s world premiere in IDFA’s Frontlight strand, the Syrian war has been raging for 11 years, and the film joins a multitude of documentaries about the conflict from Silvered Water to For Sama . Its sensitive exploration of this unchecked humanitarian crisis and forensic investigation of state-sanctioned murder remain painfully relevant, and should command the attention of further events and perhaps boutique or non-fiction distributors; Sophie Dulac Distribution will release in France and Films That Matter in Germany.

Filmmakers Stephane Malterre (whose previous documentaries about the Syrian conflict include The Father, The Son And The Jihad) and journalist Garance La Caisne (credited as co-author and historical advisor) present enough evidence to classify what is happening in Syria as genocide; President Bashar al-Assad’s regime “hoovering up”, in the chilling words of one expert, over 100,000 Syrians since 2011. While these atrocities are overwhelming in their scope — and intimately detailed in Ceasar’s explicit photographs — the film distils this sprawling inhumanity into the stories of two victims.

They are Spanish-Syrian Abdul, whose body was identified in Ceasar’s images by his sister, and French-Syrian Mazzen, who went missing with his teenage son Patrick in 2013. As these men have dual citizenship, their families are able to pursue justice in Spain and France respectively. Across five gruelling years, the film follows lawyers as they assemble evidence, interview survivors — a sequence of a Syrian man describing his torture in the opulent safety of The Hague is a wrenching disconnect — and attempt to get their cases heard in both national and international courts.

Despite the obvious crimes on display, European legal systems are reluctant to take on these cases and international options are severely limited. (In 2014, Russia and China vetoed a UN Security Council resolution to allow international criminal courts to prosecute the Syrian regime.) Editor Sebastien Touta deftly shapes years of footage into a coherent, compelling narrative which captures the frustrations of a system that claims to be sympathetic but fails to act, and the prolonged devastation of families left without answers.

There has been some progress. Earlier this year, a German court sentenced ex-Syrian intelligence officer Anwar Raglan to life imprisonment for war crimes after he attempted to seek asylum in the country. In 2019, then-President Trump signed into law the Ceasar Act which sanctions the Syrian government for its war crimes. Yet, as The Lost Souls Of Syria emphasises, this is a Sisyphean fight and, almost a decade after Ceasar released his irrefutable evidence to the world, there is still little to document in the way of justice.