Between censorship and chaos: Syrian artists wary of new regime

KASHEESH, Syria — It was the last day of principal photography, and the day-time shots would begin in a brisk but brilliantly sunny morning in Kasheesh, a tiny village ensconced in the forested mountains of northwest Syria. Though the cast and crew of the television series “Al-Batal,” or “The Hero,” were happy to be wrapping up, there was a tinge of anxiety.

For months, the drama happening elsewhere in the country had imposed itself on set: First the rapid-fire disintegration of the ruling regime in December; then, in March, a spate of sectarian massacres in villages just a few dozen miles away from Kasheesh.

“Maybe we’ll get a third cataclysm before we’re done … a dragon or something descending on us here,” joked Haima Ismail, a veteran Syrian actor, drawing a few cautious chuckles from crew members before her face turned serious.

“I don’t know where we’re heading. It’s like you’re falling and can’t find the ground.”

That was a common feeling among many artists in the country these days. Though few are sorry to see the downfall of former President Bashar Assad, they fear the Islamist-led authorities now in charge may prove to be just as restrictive in what they allow on screen.

“Before, the difficulties we faced were about the choices in the script, how truthful you could be about what was going on here,” said Nour Al-Ali, one of the series’ top-billed Syrian actresses. “Now I’m afraid we’re going to face censorship in a different way.”

Members of the crew prepare for a scene on the set of the Ramadan television series “Al-Ahd” (“The Pledge”) in Damascus in February.

(Aaref Watad / AFP via Getty Images)

A lot of people don’t know this, but Syria is a powerhouse maker of serialized television. Well before streaming gained popularity, viewers would gorge on Syrian miniseries — from glamorous telenovelas to historical dramas. Cranked out by the dozen, the shows turned their stars into household names across the Arab world.

The country’s 14-year civil war ravaged the industry, but during Assad’s reign, many of those series became a particularly potent propaganda tool.

A state-backed production company financed shows emphasizing fealty to the ruler and demonizing Assad’s adversaries as jihad-crazed chaos agents. Scripts for private productions were subject to suffocating controls. Celebrity actors and showrunners who strayed from the rah-rah government line, or who broached third-rail topics such as Assad’s security forces’ culpability in atrocities, found themselves attacked, blacklisted or even forced into exile.

Haima Ismail, a veteran Syrian actor, performs a scene for “Al-Batal.”

(Nabih Bulos / Los Angeles Times)

That “Al-Batal” made it to production at all was a function of director Al-Layth Hajjo’s ability to deftly navigate those red lines.

The story focuses on two figures, a school principal and a thug. When war comes to their village, the principal is paralyzed saving a displaced child, while the thug takes advantage of the bedlam to gain influence, assisting villagers by providing goods through smuggling and standing up militias to protect their homes. The series, according to Hajjo, explores the difference between those who are truly heroes, and those who pretend to be so as a result of war.

Ensconced among monitors and other studio equipment in the bedroom of a house for an interior shot, Hajjo, an athletic-looking 53-year-old in a gray polo shirt and red-rimmed glasses, spoke of frequent clashes with the Assad-era censor while writing the script.

“He obsessed over silly details, like if the accent of the policeman hinted at his sect, or that we had a cockroach crawling over the picture of an army soldier,” Hajjo said. Such distractions helped Hajjo subtly slip things past censors. “You put them in a situation where they just don’t pay attention to the important issues you’re saying,” Hajjo added, laughing as he spoke.

“He kept telling me, ‘There’s something in this text. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t trust your intentions.’”

It took a month of cajoling, but the script finally passed. Still, a few weeks after shooting began, Hajjo submitted the first 10 episodes to the censorship board, and the deputy minister, who represented the security agencies, vowed the series would be suspended.

1

2

1. Director Al-Layth Hajjo changed the last scene of “Al-Batal” to reflect the collapse of Bashar Assad’s 54-year-old dynasty. Here actors hold Syria’s new flag, which replaced a red band with a green one. (Nabih Bulos / Los Angeles Times) 2. Actors perform in the last scene of the “Al-Batal” series. Filming had been interrupted by the fall of Assad and unrest in Syria. (Nabih Bulos / Los Angeles Times)

Indeed, it was later suspended, but not in the way the deputy minister would have liked. In December, a rebel coalition led by the Islamist faction Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham began its assault on Assad’s forces. In a moment of art imitating life, the “Al-Batal” crew was filming a scene where villagers salute the Syrian flag during a nearby barrage, even as the rebels advanced on Damascus.

“We’re standing there shooting people singing the national anthem with explosions in the background, and we’re getting word that Hama city is falling,” Hajjo said.

When the opposition reached the outskirts of the city of Homs, Hajjo, fearing the main road to Damascus would be cut, pulled the plug. On Dec. 7, hours before Assad’s escape to Russia, he loaded the cast and crew in buses, and led the way to the capital. Once there, he managed to get Farah Bseiso, a Palestinian-Jordanian actor, and his Polish director of photography, Zbigniew Rybczynski, out of the country.

For the first few weeks, Hajjo, like most Syrians stunned by the lightning-fast implosion of Assad’s 54-year-old dynasty, stayed home. But the situation appeared calm, and with Ramadan coming, he decided to approach the new authorities to restart filming.

“‘Al-Batal’ was a cause for me. And I considered what happened to be a golden opportunity to finish what I wanted to say in the series — without censorship,” Hajjo said.

He talked to anyone in the fledgling government he could find, but all appeared perplexed why he was reaching out to them in the first place.

“They kept asking ‘So? Go film. What does it have to do with us? Why do you need us?’” Hajjo said. He finally convinced officials to give him the necessary permits.

Director Al-Layth Hajjo, left, and actor Haima Ismail, center, prepare for the last day of principal photography for “Al-Batal.”

(Nabih Bulos / Los Angeles Times)

Some of the cast and crew couldn’t return, but most did, including Al-Ali, who had fled to Dubai a few days after the regime’s collapse.

Initially, the actor, who had spent much of the war in Syria, thought that it was time now for her to watch events unfolding in her country “from the outside.” But when Hajjo called, she felt she had to return.

“I wanted to be a part of the show because it spoke in a humanitarian way about the war, where so many were killed even though it had nothing to do with them,” she said.

Twenty-five days after Assad’s ouster, the production was back on. Then came the massacres.

In early March, Assad loyalists launched a series of attacks on the new government’s security forces. Government forces and thousands of fighters — including from Sunni jihadist factions — beat back the loyalists but also hunted down Alawites, who share Assad’s religion and were seen by many Syrians as complicit in his policies. More than 1,000 civilians were tortured and executed, rights groups say.

Al-Ali was at her family’s home in Jableh, a coastal city that saw some of the worst massacres. She livestreamed a selfie-video, where she appears teary-eyed and terrified as pro-government gunmen roam the streets below, asking if someone is Sunni or Alawite before shooting those who answer the latter.

When things calmed down Al-Ali returned to Kasheesh to finish filming. But the optimism she and others felt during the first heady months after Assad’s fall was shattered; the violence seemed a harbinger of a new dictatorship dominated not by Assad’s ideology but by Sunni religious fervor.

The government’s recent moves have done little to change that perception. Critics point out that the newly appointed Cabinet is dominated by Islamists, with some ministers espousing a hard-line interpretation of Sharia law. The culture minister, meanwhile, already managed to draw criticism for dismissive views on non-Arab Syrian minorities and their languages. Sulaf Fawakherji, a Syrian actor known for her pro-Assad views, was recently removed from the actors’ syndicate for denying the former government’s crimes.

“Look, in our theater we have Shakespeare, things from American and Russian everyday life, scenes that require a certain kind of dress, or a kiss, or depicting sexual harassment — I don’t know if all this will become forbidden,” said Bashar Sheikh Saleh, a 25-year-old acting student at the state-backed Higher Institute for Dramatic Arts, who was acting in “Al-Batal” as part of his graduation project.

Yet so far, authorities have mostly hewed to the if-it-ain’t-broke approach. Officials at the institute in Damascus are still unclear what will happen to their funding, but those interviewed said they received encouraging signs from the government. Elsewhere, cultural performances continue, with hitherto banned books appearing in the stalls of sidewalk bookstores. Films that were once surreptitiously passed around via bootleg videos are getting their first theatrical run in the country.

But Hajjo worries this will change.

“Their priority today is how to convey themselves positively to the street. They think actors and shows can do that,” he said. “My fear is that, after a while, when they consolidate control, they won’t need us anymore.”

The sun was setting, and the cast assembled for the final crowd scene. It was the one part of the show that had undergone substantial rewrites, Hajjo said, to account for the regime’s collapse, which was why some crowd members carried Syria’s new flag, a tricolor with bands of green, white and black, the green replacing red.

Al-Ali got into position. Once filming was done, she would go to Dubai once more.

“I’m going to leave,” she said, her tone subdued, before she quickly added: “Not forever. When things are stable, I’ll return.”

She fell silent for a beat, her eyes downcast.

“But you know, I used to say this before: Throughout the war, I said I would leave for good,” she said. “And I always returned.”