Bidayat Al Cinama fi Sourriya

Youssef Fahdah’s film is important in that it has conserved the testimonies and images of the early pioneers of Syrian cinema, many of whose works have since become invisible. Rachid Jalal (screenwriter and producer of Under Damascus Skies) talks of his early career as a photographer and film-reporter in the late 1920s. Ayoub Badry recalls the story of the first Syrian feature film The Innocent Suspect. There is also the photographer, Nour El Dine Ramadan, who made many documents on the Syrian social and political life of the 1930s and 40s, and who developed his films in an apparatus of his own invention. He spent his final years in a small camera repair shop.