In the early days of the Syrian uprising, Daham Alassad worked as a tour guide in his hometown of Palmyra, leading a group through the ruins of the ancient city. When a tourist handed him his camera to record a few snapshots, the guide accidentally captured footage of a peaceful demonstration against the regime of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad. Unexpectedly, this video went viral. And before he knew it, Arasad was running away for his life.
It was the beginning of a remarkable journey that took Alasad from Syria, soon to be mired in more than a decade of civil war, to the safety of Europe, where he began documenting efforts to bring Syrian war criminals to justice. These efforts form the framework for Arasad’s debut documentary feature, Ashes, which he will present at the Pitching Forum at Thessaloniki International Airport. The documentary festival will run from March 5th to 15th.
Ashes was produced by Bård Kjøge Rønning and Fabien Greenberg of Antipode Films, the Norwegian film company behind the Academy Award-winning No Other Land, and co-produced with Céline Nusse of France’s Zadig Productions and Alhumam Alasaad of Syria’s emerging production company Bel Studios. Currently in the early stages of production, Alasad hopes to wrap principal photography later this year.
Speaking to Variety at a festival in Thessaloniki, the director explained how his film, which spent the better part of a decade in both Europe and Syria, is an exploration of the pursuit of justice, yet rooted in the personal history of countless Syrians like him.
“‘Ashes’ began with a personal need to document this absence through my story and the stories of other traumatized people across borders,” he said. “What bothered me most was not just the loss of home and identity, but the absence of justice, the sense that Syrians were being wiped out without accountability.”
Alassad’s own journey began with a desperate escape from Palmyra, where he joined 20 fellow travelers and set off on foot into the Syrian desert, walking some 320 miles to reach the Jordanian border.
Among the first Syrians to flee to the neighboring kingdom, they settled in small refugee camps, where Alassad began documenting their daily lives using a digital camera. He soon took formal journalism classes, moved to Turkey within a year, and by 2013 crossed the Syrian border to cover the civil war in full swing.
He eventually settled in Denmark, where he continued to document the war for Danish media, while also traveling to Greece and Turkey to cover the growing refugee crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean. However, the job left him dissatisfied and unsure of how much his reporting could accomplish.
“I’ve always been looking for justice. What is justice? How can we achieve justice?” the director said. “We are far from home. Is what I’m doing justice?”
Years later, while living in Paris, Alassad heard the story of Amjad Job, a young Syrian lawyer and former detainee of al-Khatib prison who had survived torture by the notorious colonel and intelligence agent Anwar Raslan. Years later, while living in exile, he unexpectedly stumbles upon Raslan, a former torture officer living freely, in a supermarket in Berlin. Thus began Job’s relentless pursuit to bring the Colonel to justice.
Alasad traveled to Germany to document Job’s efforts to collect eyewitness accounts and evidence of war crimes from thousands of miles away from where they were committed. Raslan was ultimately tried and convicted of crimes against humanity, making history as the first official of the former al-Assad regime to face justice for wartime atrocities.
It was the beginning of a wide-ranging effort to track down Syrian war criminals hiding across Europe, which Mr Alassad admitted “gave me purpose in life”. The director said, “I didn’t have a vision of what justice was. I was living day to day.” “But when I met the people who were tracking war criminals, I thought, ‘This person is better than me.'”
In December 2024, five years after Ashes was filmed, the story took an unexpected turn when the al-Assad regime suddenly collapsed. The director was on one of the first planes to Damascus, and Job followed soon after, joining thousands of Syrians returning from exile to sort out the wreckage of the war.
Shortly after arriving, Arasad followed Job back to the very prison where he had once been tortured. There they discovered millions of documents and hidden records that could reshape Syria’s justice system, exposing the secret chain of command in one of the most brutal regimes in modern history.
“Ashes” is a personal excavation of a past lost or forever changed by the atrocities of the al-Assad regime. But the film also focuses squarely on the reconstruction project, trying to imagine what kind of nation might emerge from war-torn Syria.
“Justice is the only way to achieve peace,” Alasad insisted. “Without justice, there is no future.”
Thessaloniki Documentary Festival will be held from March 5th to 15th.
