It has been 18 months since the body of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi washed up on the shore of Turkey, the premature end of a flight from Syria.
Nilüfer Demir’s photo of Kurdi, face down in the morning surf, prompted an outpouring of compassion for refugees around Europe and North America.
Now, voters in developed countries are rewarding candidates for smearing refugee resettlement as a cultural and security threat, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Director Evgeny Afineevsky hopes his new documentary, Cries From Syria, which premieres at 10 p.m. Monday on HBO, can revive our collective sympathy.
“I tried to show the human side of these people, and their dignity,” he said in an interview from Los Angeles. “Their dignity is the essential thing.”
Its HBO premiere and limited run in Los Angeles and New York movie theaters falls on nearly on the sixth anniversary of Syria’s murderous war, one so brutish, the U.N. has lost count of the death toll. Most estimates put it over 400,000. The government is responsible for the bulk of those fatalities.
Cries From Syria is a difficult film that opens with a shot of little Aylan’s body before rewinding to the popular uprising that spiraled into war.
The historical context given is thin, but in broad strokes, is factually correct.