Independent Syrian Filmmaker Missing

Orwa Nyrabia is a Syrian filmmaker.

He co-owns an independent documentary-film company in Syria.

Last week, he went missing just before he was supposed to board a flight from Damascus to Cairo.

New Yorker magazine staff writer Lawrence Wright met Nyrabia during a trip to Syria in 2006.

He speaks with anchor Marco Werman about his recent article about Nyrabia’s disappearance.

I had the good fortune at the time to meet Orwa Nyrabia (also transcribed Nairabiya). He is a big, ironic, bold spirit, whose jolly nature seemed perversely at odds with the grimly repressive atmosphere inside that country. With another producer, Diana el-Jeiroudi, Orwa started Proaction Film, the only independent documentary-film company in Syria. The two of them also created Dox Box, the largest documentary-film festival in the Arab world.

Orwa was one man who quietly stood against the Syrian police state. He was not a revolutionary but he was an independent filmmaker, which inevitably placed him in jeopardy. In this brutalized society, he was also a person who still held onto joy and hope, qualities that are hunted down in Syria by forces dedicated to suffocating the best in human nature. Read more >>

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Marco Werman: Back to Syria now and to the case of a Syrian filmmaker who has disappeared in the midst of all the fighting there. The filmmaker’s Orwa Nyrabia . New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright has been following this case. Wright met Nyrabia during a trip to Syria back in 2006.

Lawrence Wright: What’s really distictive about him is that he’s an independent filmmaker in a country where the government controls almost all access to culture in any form. He really stood out because he separated himself from the government and began making his own movies and created an international film festival called Dox Box, which is the largest in the middle east region.

Werman: And what’s happened to him most recently?

Wright: All we know is that he was about to board a flight to Cairo from Damascus last week, but he didn’t make the flight and his family doesn’t know where he is. In Syria, that’s usually a very ominous signal.

Werman: And has Nyrabia produce any film recently that’s particularly critical of the Syrian regime?

Wright: Well, all of his films have been critical, but he’s not an overt revolutionary. That’s not how you work in Syria. In fact, the weird and bizarre thing about Syrian cinema is that most of it is paid for by the government. The films are often critical of the government and they’re never shown in Syria. They’re shown all over the world in festivals and so on, but in Syria the government frowns on public assembly. So they simply have shut down most of the movie theatres. There used to be 120 cinemas in Syria and when I was there in 2006 there were only six remaining.

Werman: Wow.

Wright: The way that the government controls the culture in Syria by repression, but also by corraling all the artists, and this is what made Orwa so distinctive. He stood out of that system. There was practically no one like him in Syria. He was independent. He made his own movies. He made connections all around the world and he helped Arab filmmakers get their products out to the western world and meet each other. He was a great impresario and connector.

Werman: I mean, you just made a point that I think is pretty key for a lot of our listeners. That over the years the Assad regime hasn’t just been vigiliant about crushing public demonstrations and dissent, but any kind of public gathering.

Wright: Absolutely and I think one of the reasons that the Syrian rebellion has such a hard time cohering and finding leadership, is that for decades the Syrian regime has cut down any kind of intellectual and artistic life. So the kind of existence that Orwa was trying to propagate in Syria is exactly what the government was resisting.

Werman: Now, you were in Syria in 2006. As you look back on it now, do you recall anything in the sphere of Syrian art and culture and film that gives you now kind of a better understanding of what sparked the Syrian uprising last year.

Wright: Listen. I’d traveled all over the middle east and it’s a very voluable region, as you know, but Syria was so quiet. I didn’t know what kind of life they had there and I thought, “Well, perhaps, everybody in the world knows America through it’s movies. Maybe I can go to Syria, watch all their movies, and meet their filmmakers and learn something about the interior life of Syrians.” And it was revelatory. For one thing, the movies were full of abuse. Physical abuse. As I learned, one of the characteristics about this particular regime is how brutal it is. Everybody I met had been beaten at some point in their lives. Not just by the regime. The tyranny manifests itself in all the different institutions. Even replicating itself inside the family. As one of my sources, Osama Muhammad perhaps Syria’s greatest filmmaker, said, “It’s hard enough to fight the dictator. What’s really hard is to the fight the tyrant inside ourselves.”

Werman: Do you have any theory, Lawrence, about why Orwa Nyrabia was detained?

Wright: I think mainly his independence is what. It’s not that he was a notable member of the revolution or that he was in the street fighting. No. He was not. He was simply standing for artistic freedom in a country where that’s stamped out at every opportunity. Syria will have a future, one day, but it’s going to be a lot darker if voices like his are suppressed and silenced by the regime.

Werman: Lawrence Wright, staff writer with the New Yorker Magazine, speaking with us about Syrian filmmaker Orwa Nyrabia who went missing about a week ago. Thank you very much.

Wright: It was a pleasure. Thanks again.

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