Syria’s lost souls: the fight for justice using the ‘Caesar files’ Bashar Al Assad
Syrian citizens fight for accountability in court, using smuggled photographs to expose government atrocities.
Approximately 27,000 photographs of dead and tortured civilian detainees were smuggled out of secret Syrian government archives by a military defector nicknamed “Caesar” and made public in 2014. They were presented to the United Nations as evidence of the killing of 11,000 people by the Bashar al-Assad regime. Civilians were detained in the same area from March 2011 to August 2013. After a search for justice failed to result in a trial, the victims’ families turned to the courts of Europe.
This documentary film is based on two of these cases over five years – one in Spain, where a woman recognizes her brother as one of the dead bodies in the “Cesar” photographs, and the other in France, where lawyer Clémence Béctart Has launched an investigation into the disappearance of his client’s brother and nephew from a detention center in Damascus. The film features the testimony of “Caesar”, his companion “Sami”, and other Syrians, highlighting their tragic experiences in the pursuit of truth and justice.
