It’s becoming increasingly common for filmmakers to use the houses and neighbourhoods of destroyed and displaced Syrian towns and cities as locations for films sponsored and encouraged by the Syrian regime and its allies.

After being granted permission by the military authorities controlling these neighbourhoods, they become sets for a wide range of filmmakers who burst with their film crews into those places with their cameras, ignoring the raw recent memories of a place; the sanctity of homes; the stories, lives and memories of their inhabitants. Instead, they are committed to complete silence or a scandalous impartiality about the reasons these cities and towns are the scenes of utter destruction, death and exodus.

These devastated towns and cities transformed into cinematic backdrops are not only places where war crimes have been freshly committed, including the shelling of residential areas, schools, hospitals or bakeries. They are also the site of ongoing crimes against humanity in the form of the forced displacement of their rightful inhabitants, and the prevention of their right to return to their homes. These crimes have recently been given legal cover through the so-called ‘process of reconstruction and city-planning’. This is an ongoing effort to wipe away the traces of those crimes and the imposition of new facts on the ground. This process aims to strip rightful owners of their homes and property; their lives, memory and right of return; their right to seek justice; and their overall rights as citizens.

Inside regime-controlled Syria, our friends and comrades are struggling to preserve their stories and memories. Their voices may not be heard and their names may be kept anonymous, but their cameras are still recording and documenting. Their refusal of any form of ‘cinematic looting’ of their towns and cities is a sign of their ongoing dignity in the face of increasingly shameful cultural normalization that leads to crimes going unpunished and perpetrators walking free.

We Syrians, women and men, working in cinema and image-making, out of self-respect and the honour of our profession, refuse to turn the destruction of Syrian cities and the ransacking of houses into debris and rubble used as movie sets for regime-sponsored films, with all the evidence and the crimes they bear traces of against their owners buried within them—those people whose only fault was to suffer the consequences of demanding their right to dignity, freedom and a decent life. We cannot allow these narratives to manipulate our own stories, our hopes, and our images. These devastated cities and towns, dilapidated and emptied from their forcibly displaced people have never been and will never be ruins to weep over. They are an essential part of our narrative and our stories that we will preserve and tell and pass on until justice is served and criminals are convicted.

The independence of culture and the autonomy of art are not won by censorship nor by accepting the narratives of killers, and forgetting the sacrifices and struggles of peoples that have risen up for freedom and dignity. Therefore, we condemn any documentary or fiction films that have been implicated in this form of cinematic looting, which manipulates the memory that belongs to people and places, and colluding with those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity.