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 More than three years and several perilous trips to Syria
later, her documentary "Red Lines" is a unique record of her
travels with Mouaz Moustafa and his fellow-activist Razan Shalab
al-Sham, a leading Syrian women's rights activist.
When Kalin met Mouaz through a common friend, Mouaz had already
been to Syria as head of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a
pro-democracy NGO, supporting the groups whose peaceful protests
began the uprising in early 2011.
"He was supporting civic outreach, and at the same time, he was
pushing the civil society, peace," Kalin, an award-winning
documentary maker, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a
phone interview from Washington.
Mouaz, now a U.S. citizen, was also warning the U.S.
authorities: "if they don't support the opposition and moderates
and give them the support they need, they are going to be
overrun and subsumed by the extremists. He was saying this three
years ago," Kalin recalls.
Intrigued by the young man, Kalin put all her other work on hold
and focused her lens on Syria.
"I just jumped in, with no funding, with no resources, with no
concept of how we're going to tell the story, but I knew it was
unfolding in front of my eyes. It's an important story to
capture," said Kalin.
Mouaz introduced Kalin to Razan, a young activist who had fled
to Turkey. She was making dangerous trips across the border into
Syria, using a network of activists to smuggle medical aid to
opposition groups.
By building trust and a close relationship with the two young
activists, Kalin was able to capture valuable footage inside
Syria and tell the stories that had not reached the mainstream
news media.
"We weren't to tell the American embassy; we didn't go with a
security detail, we didn't have insurance. We were like
guerrilla filmmakers with our cameras,” said Kalin.
“My co-director Oliver Lukacs and I made four trips to Syria,
two I went on, two Oliver went on, (we were) at Razan's 'mercy',
so to speak - we never went in a legal way. We were lucky."
The relationship they built with their Syrian friends, "that
trust is very important to be able to get access" to people in
the turbulent country, she said.
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“I started out as a radio journalist, and I know the difference of
the level of intimacy with your characters,” said Kalin.
For Kalin, the true revolution in Syria is the gradual change in
women's roles in a traditional society. She attended women's
governance courses in Turkey organized by Razan, who told her that
no women had held positions on local councils in Syria before the
uprising.
Razan and fellow activists hoped that by encouraging women to work
in politics, they would contribute more and have a bigger say in
building civil society. Many women made the hazardous trip across
the border to join the training sessions.
“For me, the strongest moment in the filmmaking was ... watching
women being trained in the electoral process. The setting was bleak,
a typical hotel room, with Disney stickers on the wall, and they
used a ‘ballot’ box made from a cardboard box for wine glasses,”
said Kalin.
“It was in that room those women changed my perceptions. They were
the ones that were learning about democracy, and (from their
spirit), I learnt the real practice of democracy."
“It’s a story that has been missed ... those young activists were
willing to sacrifice everything for a cause. People were overlooking
that there were so many young people in the Arab world that want the
same thing as we have in the west, that we take for granted.”
“We still turn our back on a nation whose population is 40 percent
displaced, and where tens of thousands have been killed.
Unfortunately, the political situation is very difficult (to
change). For me, the best the film could do is to raise awareness,
and prick people's conscience about the suffering of the Syrian
people.”
"Red Lines" will be screened in the UK at the Rich Mix cinema in
east London on Sept. 25.
(Editing by Tim Pearce)
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