Berlin Panorama Doc ‘Under the Sky of Damascus’ Records the Silent War Against Women in Syria
variety.comChristopher Vourlias Though the world watched — often in silence — as a decade-long civil war tore Syria apart, exiled filmmakers Talal Derki (“Of Fathers and Sons”) and Heba Khaled say an equally brutal but less visible war is still raging.
In “Under the Sky of Damascus,” which premieres Feb. 20 in the Panorama strand of the Berlin Film Festival, the duo shifts the lens to the silenced majority of Syrian women who routinely face sexual harassment, violence and abuse in their patriarchal society.
The film follows a tight-knit group of young Syrian women who embark upon on a radical project to produce a play that lays bare the culture of misogyny and sexual abuse that has blighted the lives of females in their country for generations.
Fanning out across the war-weary Syrian capital, they record testimonies from actresses to factory workers to stay-at-home mothers, revealing how women from across Syrian society share the same harrowing tales of abuse, blackmail and even imprisonment at the hands of men who wield unchecked power in the rubble of post-war Syria. “I myself am a survivor,” said first-time director Khaled, who was raised in a deeply conservative Muslim family in Damascus and left Syria in 2014. “We decided to tell the story of women because they were absent in most of the Syrian documentary films [since the start of the war].
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