Feras Fayyad

When protests began against the Assad government, Fayyad grabbed his camera and went to the streets. He documented the early peaceful demonstrations, the arrests, the ruthless, violent government response, and the shooting of protesters in an attempt to quell the rebellion. He taught others to document the revolt until he was arrested in a policy of sweeping arrests.

Fayyad spent up to 18 months in his two times imprisonment, He was transferred between a number of detention center of the Syrian intelligence services facilities, Accused of spying and anti-regime activities; he was hung by his wrists for hours, beaten, lashed, and starved; kept in a filthy communal cell where it was hard to tell who was still alive. Fayyad was convinced he would die in prison. Even fellow inmates said he would not make it out alive.

Fayyad was released without explanation, and his family urged him to leave the country, convinced he would not survive another arrest. He fled Syria soon after. He fled to Turkey, then snuck back across the Syrian border to the besieged city of Aleppo to film Syrian civilians under bombardment, then to Europe But even then, his torture continued to haunt him, causing physical pain and reoccurring nightmares.

Fayyad was the first victim to tell the Koblenz courtroom of the frankly unimaginable horror of Branch 251, “the Al-Khatib detention center” in Damascus, in the world's first case of its kind. The trial of two alleged torturers at the upper regional court, a German court in the western city of Koblenz. After a string of investigators, experts, and law enforcers, he is the first witness with personal experience of the torture rather than stories and reports. In court, Fayyad declines to try to put into words the screams he had heard, but the director says via his interpreter: "One day I will try to describe it in my films."