Sundance Film Festival’s Focus on Syria

The Sundance Film Festival is known primarily for introducing emerging American filmmaking talent to the world from the mountaintops of Park City. Sometimes, though, it offers something more--a clarion call that amplifies unheard, or unheeded, voices. Nowhere was this more resonant than at the Sundance premieres of Last Men in Aleppo, City of Ghosts, and Cries from Syria. Choosing to showcase three films about Syria when one might have sufficed is a testimony to intent of curatorial choice and the power of artistic expression to command attention, demand reflection, and galvanize engagement. In the current climate in which leaders invoke fear-inflected speech while policy makers defer to the "complexity" of the Syrian "problem," this triptych of outstanding documentaries all focused on the same region provides a bracing and humanizing alternative narrative. Here, Thielen examines the three documentaries.