Syria Picks Saydnaya Prison Doc For First Post-Assad Oscar Bid — SkimNews
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- Syria selected Tawfik Sabouni's 'The Other Side of the Sun' as its candidate for Best International Feature Film at the 99th Academy Awards, marking the country's first Oscar submission since the ouster of dictator Bashar al-Assad in December 2024.
- The General Organization for Cinema made the selection through Syria's newly established Oscar committee, which is accredited by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — the first such committee under the transitional government of President Ahmed al-Sharaa.
- The film is set in Saydnaya prison, dubbed the 'Human Slaughterhouse,' where an estimated 30,000 people were killed under the Assad regime and tens of thousands more were held on sham charges and tortured.
- Director Tawfik Sabouni, himself a former Saydnaya detainee, based the documentary on his imprisonment and that of four other survivors; after the regime's collapse he returned to the prison with fellow survivors to film reenactments of their detention.
- 'The Other Side of the Sun' premiered in the Panorama section of the Berlinale earlier this year and swept the Arab Documentary Feature Competition at the Amman International Film Festival, winning the Jury Award, FIPRESCI Award, and Audience Award.
- Sabouni called the selection 'an immense personal and collective victory' and said the film exists to give voice to 'those whom others have sought to silence,' placing the work squarely in the frame of memory and testimony rather than conventional documentary reconstruction.
Why it matters: For Syria's transitional government, this submission is a symbolic first — the first Oscar entry under post-Assad authorities, filed through an Academy-accredited committee that didn't exist before December 2024. The choice of subject, a hybrid documentary built on survivor reenactments inside Saydnaya prison, prioritizes testimony over entertainment, giving the Academy a film carrying roughly 30,000 documented deaths as its backstory.
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