When the trailer for Ruba Nadda’s political thriller Inescapable hit the Web last month, the Web hit back. Commenters unleashed a stream of vitriolic feedback that even included death threats against the Montreal-born writer-director.
The movie – which will screen at the International Film Festival – is about a former officer in the Syrian military police who’s forced to return to Damascus when his globe-trotting daughter goes missing there.
Nadda, who spent a considerable chunk of her adolescence shuffling between Syria and Canada, intended the film as an eye-opening critique of what she feels is a poisonous government regime. So when supporters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad began attacking her viciously online, she felt less victimized than validated.
“It’s funny, because I feel justified,” Nadda said during an interview in Toronto this week.
“For years, people were saying that I was paranoid and crazy for feeling like this [about Syria]. Now I’m like, see? I’m not crazy.
“The comments were insane. Alliance had to dismantle the comments section because they were threatening my life,” she added, referring to the film’s distributor. “I was like: ‘Aha! I was right.’”
Ms. Nadda has every right--or should--to make a movie about the "troubles" in Syria from any perspective she chooses. The death threats against her are criminal acts which should be investigated and, if warranted, prosecuted to the fullest.
The above having been said, no good outcome can be expected out of the Syrian civil war now in progress. Either the Baathists (mainly supported by the Alawite minority with Christians, secularists, and other marginal demographic elements of the population) retain their police state--which would be generally good news to those minorities--or, should Ms. Nadda get her wish, the rebels, now mainly composed of jihadis, set up an Islamicist theocratic police state. Either way, democracy is not in the cards (except perhaps as a one man, one vote, _once_ sort of thing, as we've seen in other Moslem countries already blessed by the sequelae of the "Arab Spring").
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Ms. Nadda has every right--or should--to make a movie about the "troubles" in Syria from any perspective she chooses. The death threats against her are criminal acts which should be investigated and, if warranted, prosecuted to the fullest.
The above having been said, no good outcome can be expected out of the Syrian civil war now in progress. Either the Baathists (mainly supported by the Alawite minority with Christians, secularists, and other marginal demographic elements of the population) retain their police state--which would be generally good news to those minorities--or, should Ms. Nadda get her wish, the rebels, now mainly composed of jihadis, set up an Islamicist theocratic police state. Either way, democracy is not in the cards (except perhaps as a one man, one vote, _once_ sort of thing, as we've seen in other Moslem countries already blessed by the sequelae of the "Arab Spring").
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