Syrian civilians are fighting for accountability in court and using smuggled photos to expose government atrocities.
Some 27,000 photos of dead and tortured civilian prisoners were smuggled from secret Syrian government archives by a military defector codenamed “Caesar” and published in 2014. They were presented to the United Nations as evidence of Bashar al-Assad’s regime’s killing of 11,000 civilian prisoners in a single region from March 2011 to August 2013. Afterwards, the search for justice failed in the event of prosecution, and the victims’ families turned to courts in Europe.
This documentary follows two of these cases over more than five years – one in Spain, where a woman identifies her brother as one of the bodies in the “Caesar” photos, and the other in France, where lawyer Clemence Bectarte launches an investigation into the disappearance of her client’s brother and nephew in an internment camp in Damascus. The film includes testimonies from “Caesar,” his accomplice “Sami,” and other Syrians who highlight their harrowing experiences in the pursuit of truth and justice.
