Dieu et les chiens
Abounaddara Collective
Syria | 2014 | 12 min
Language : Arabic
Subtitles : English, French
The Abounaddara collective brings together self-taught filmmakers who, since the demonstrations against the Bashar al-Assad regime, have been publishing short films online from their Damascus base to share the realities of Syria. In this testimony, a young “revolutionary” recounts how he had to kill a man who he knew was innocent. A raw account of the banality of evil that disturbs our clear conscience.
The Abounaddara collective brings together self-taught filmmakers who, since the demonstrations against the Bashar Al-Assad regime began in spring 2011, have been publishing short films online from their Damascus base every week to document the realities of Syria today. Anonymous and on an equal footing with the ordinary men and women they film, the members of Abounaddara practise a kind of “emergency cinema”, accepting as their peers Dziga Vertov and the Syrian elders, including Omar Amiralay, who died on the eve of the “revolution”. Of God and Dogs is therefore a blunt, precise and raw testimony by filmmakers whose images burn your retinas as they expose the banality of the evil that resides in our depths. A haunted man on the run recounts in a fixed close-up the interrogation of an innocent man whom he had to finish off with a gunshot, unable as he was to bear any longer to witness the “humiliation” of the ceaseless torture that his comrades in arms were inflicting upon the victim. A cautionary tale? Probably… Beneath its apparent universality, this testimony reveals the motivations behind a merciless war unfolding far away from our clear consciences, kept at the right distance by “loyalists” and their impartial accomplices who work in western embassies.
Emmanuel Chicon
