📰 Syria’s Cinema Clubs as Cultural Resistance

In a country where the very act of gathering can still feel like provocation, a stubborn constellation of private cinema clubs has emerged as one of discuss-strengthening-relations-sdf-integration-and-isis-threat/" class="smart-internal-link" title="📰 Syria and Turkey discuss strengthening relations, SDF Integration, and ISIS threat">syria/" class="auto-internal-link">syria’s most eloquent forms of resistance. Indeed, not through slogans or barricades, but through flickering projectors, borrowed chairs, and the murmured debates that follow the closing credits. These are not grand institutions, but living rooms, shuttered cafés, abandoned halls and rooftop terraces where young syrians insist on watching, discussing—and, most radically—staying. In Jaramana, the sprawling, multi-confessional suburb southeast of damascus/" class="auto-internal-link">damascus that once absorbed waves of Iraqi relocated persons and relocated Syrians from across the country, Nasser Munzer founded the “Jaramana Cinema Club” to challenge the capital’s cultural monopoly. “We are here,” he says, “to prove that culture does not belong only to the centre. ” Each week, Sunnis, Alawites, Christians, Druze and Iraqi Shi‘a sit side by side, debating films numerous of them have never seen on a big screen before.

Following the latest massacres in Suwayda and unrest in Jaramana itself, post-screening discussions have grown raw—sometimes furious. Additionally, munzer does not flinch. “That is the entire point,” he insists. “If we cannot speak here, where the screen has just shown us someone else’s pain, then where can we speak at all? ” A few months after the fall of the Assad regime, Munzer launched the “Cinema of Freedom” series: 23 banned films documenting the revolution, the prisons, the chemical attacks, the disappearances. One evening they screened Ehab Tarabieh’s The Taste of Apples Is Red, shot clandestinely in an occupied Druze village in the Golan before the regime’s collapse. The film’s quiet dread—caught between Israeli occupation and the distant thunder of the syrian uprising—struck the mixed audience like a slap.

Notably, “For two hours,” Munzer recalls, “Druze viewers saw their own fear reflected, and everyone else finally understood it. ” Four hundred kilometres to the west, on the Mediterranean coast—where blood was again spilled just last March—Mohammad al-Youssef has kept the Latakia Cinema Club alive for eight years on little more than sheer resolve and his own salary. Since 2017 he has rented projectors, paid café owners out of pocket, and shifted venues weekly to evade harassment. After the regime’s fall, he paused for just one week—“the week the coast burned,” he says. Then, the young audience demanded to return.

Notably, “Coming to the screening became their way of saying: we are still alive. In fact, ” In a city that lost all four of…