The Lost Souls of Syria: The fight for justice using the ‘Caesar files’
The Lost Souls of Syria: The fight for justice using the ‘Caesar files’
Syrian civilians battle for accountability in court, using smuggled photographs to expose government atrocities.
About 27,000 photos of dead and tortured civilian detainees were smuggled out of secret Syrian government archives by a military defector codenamed “Caesar” and made public in 2014. They were presented to the United Nations as evidence of the Bashar al-Assad regime’s killing of 11,000 civilian detainees in a single region from March 2011 to August 2013. After the search for justice failed to produce any prosecutions, victims’ families turned to courts in Europe.
This documentary film follows two of these cases for more than five years – one in Spain, where a woman identifies her brother as one of the bodies from the “Caesar” photos, and the other in France, where lawyer Clemence Bectarte triggers an investigation into the disappearance of her client’s brother and nephew in a detention centre in Damascus.The film features testimony from “Caesar”, his accomplice “Sami” and other Syrians, highlighting their harrowing experiences in the pursuit of truth and justice.