Ibn Al-Am (Cousin)

Mohammad Ali Atassi (2001, Syria, 44min)

Ibn al-Am focuses on Riad al-Turk, the renowned Syrian dissident and a political prisoner who spent eighteen years in solitary confinement. The film captures a moment in which Riad al-Turk had been released from prison and was restarting his political activism, and in which the Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad had recently died and his son, Bashar, had yet to solidify his hold on the Syrian state. It is also one of the first digital films made in Syria and contains the only known footage of the political salons which animated the the 2000 Damascus Spring.