Horrors of Tadmur Prison -- a Movie Description

This browser English transcription is from the online Pier 22 site. The film was released a couple years ago. The reader is encouraged to do background reading about this place. I have read other descriptions of Assad's prisons which are as bad or worse than this account. And yes, this is an example of how and why Assad maintains power. There are a few more images at the link.

Former Lebanese detainees tell of the Hell they lived in Tadmur prison

The experience of arrest in Tadmur prison is often described as the experience of staying in hell. This is what he is trying to document a film (Palmyra), which was recently exhibited at the French Institute in Beirut.

The film is directed by Monica Borgman and Lokman Salim, founders of AMEM, a humanitarian organization working on the subject of memory and the archives of the Lebanese war. The film describes the arrest diaries and horrors of prisoners living in this place.

Palmyra prison is depicted in the film as a kingdom of violence, torture, and insanity. The actors - the twenty-five former Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners in Tadmur prison - managed to get out of prison following a general amnesty issued after President Hafez al-Assad's death by President Bashar al-Assad in 2000. Their sentences ranged from six to thirteen years, The fact that they came out happened "miracle.

At the beginning of the film, we see the working group investigating the film building the virtual place they will build in the form of Tadmor prison, to film the film. They set up a deserted school on the outskirts of Beirut, built the prison cell in the basement, made a hole inside the concrete, the guards were watching the prisoners, they fixed the iron bars, the iron door of the cell, and made the black bars of the leather bars and the sticks used by the jailers. So they prepared the tools and the place to tell the stories of their arrest and the diaries of their imprisonment, sharing the roles of the past among them. Four of them would take the roles of the jailer and the executioner while the rest had to restore the role and feelings of the victims.

The reader is encouraged to drill deep into the web links
& learn more about this terrible place. This is not a secret.

The film was given to all those who had experienced the experience of arrest in Tadmur prison, but also to many Lebanese citizens who had been forcibly disappeared since the Lebanese war, and who are believed to be still in Syrian prisons.

"It is a film about the life, or about the life of every person who entered the notorious Palmyra prison, where the jailers turned into experts in torture and in degrading human dignity in systematic ways," wrote critic Giannine Jalke in L'Orient le jour.

In a dark and slow rhythm reminiscent of the suffering of the detainees, the film takes us through the worlds of anxiety, horror and fear that the actors return to perform, being the diary that accompanied their years of detention. Restoring the traumatic events and events experienced by these detained representatives leads the recipient to the question of the impact of the restoration of these feelings and experiences: is this restoration through art able to rid them of the memory of pain? Are they able to purge them of the innate feelings associated with this experience?

Whatever the answers to these questions, the restoration of these experiences with their pain and fears requires great courage in the film, and a high degree of faith in the role of art as a possibility that allows them to identify and document their cause and open the horizon of the struggle to rid other disappeared persons and detainees who are still living the same fate.

The film follows two types of narratives: narration through re-representation of scenes and events, and narration through direct testimony irrigated by former detainees, sitting in a chair in front of the camera in a room set for cinematography, and verbal and direct speech to the camera events and experiences difficult to be photographed through the first narrative , Ie by direct incarnation.

One of the methods of torture is the "reception wheel", a technique of torture where the prisoner is forced to enter through the frame of a car wheel so that he can be easily whipped. Here we learn about the types of whips, including those that are glazed with iron wire, double, triple or quadrilateral cables. The prisoner is flogged when he receives between 250-300 lashes and has to prepare them to the end. If the prisoner makes a mistake, he or she will receive the lashes from the beginning.

Other scenes in the film explain to us about the period of respiration given to prisoners but under conditions that are not far from the horror and torture, where they can be beaten by the jailers, at any moment. In this breathing activity, which is supposed to be a respite for the prisoners, they are forced to sit on their knees off the wall, the back is curved, the head between the legs, and the eyes are closed. The film's scenes also describe the manner in which the prisoners go to the cell. They walk together with their heads down to the ground, holding hands with one another. They are subjected to unrestricted intercourse at the entrance and exit, in order to deprive them of their humanity, push them to obedience and make them easier to get around.

One of the former detainees involved in the film (Musa Saab) said: "What I feared most was the weekly haircut, they forced us to shave their eyelashes, they passed the razor on the eyelashes, and at night it was painful to close the eyes, The day after shave was followed by days of sleeplessness, because the latching of the eyelids after shaving was painful, and I had to sleep with open eyes "

Musa Saab remained for five years in solitary confinement, obsessed with the vagueness of the voices that reached his solitary confinement room. Shivering alone in his cell, he sits in the position of the fetus in the hope of getting rid of his worries and fears. He had no contact with him and found himself forced to make ants, cockroaches, and flies visiting his cell friends, saying: "I wanted to make sure that I could communicate with others, I was wondering if I could still express myself? Understand what I say?

Moussa Saab accurately describes his ideas when he envied the insects for being able to move, while growing hating his belonging to the human community because of the difficult conditions he lived in prison, which was paid to wish to belong to other types of beings, other than human. The participant (Ali Abu Dahan) on the screen on the screen where he is forced to lick the wet ground with dirty water and mud.

The participants in the film reflect another influential scene: how the prisoners deal with the single egg they are given, the egg is cut into small pieces using a thread of cloth, because any other instruments are forbidden, the hacker tries to be as fair as possible, The egg will make the task very difficult. As for the method of distributing the pieces, one of the prisoners closed his eyes and did not see the piece to which another prisoner of the egg referred. Close the eyes Each piece is named not by appointment, and in this way of luck the egg pieces are distributed to the large number of prisoners, to achieve the greatest degree of justice between names.

Another story about food in prison was narrated by Ali Abu Dahan: On the day of the Baath party, the prison administration distributed pots of cooked rice with chicken. Abu Dahan was sneezing from a hole in the cell door to the corridor, where the soldiers carried the pots and put them at the door of the cells. He saw through the hole that one of the military prisoners cursed those in the cells of the prisoners and urinated over the pots of rice and chicken that would enter his cell moments later.

Ali Abu Dahan lived a struggle between telling his cellmates about the truth and depriving them of the only meal they had during the year. Or hide what they know? What if the prisoners were told that the pots of rice and chicken had been urinated by a guard? Would not all of them stop eating? Would not the jailers know that someone was groping at them by piercing the door of the cell? This is what Abu Dahan will offer to torture the limit of death if he tells his friends what he saw.

Yes, torture is death. This is what the participant (Saad Eddin Saif Eddin) says, showing how the dead, those who could not tolerate torture and torture, were left with bodies alongside the cells in the cell already crammed with bodies. The bodies remain in the cell for days before administrative officials decide to bury them. "During the five years I spent in the cell, I participated in more than 700 bodies," says Saad Eddin.

At the beginning of the film, the filmmakers explain that the stories and testimonies that are told in the film are only a small part of the torments and horrors experienced by the characters in the film.

"Prisoners rarely get alive from Tadmur prison, many leave life because of beatings and torture," says Raymond Bouban, who has spent 11 years in Syrian prisons, including five years in Tadmur prison.

The film restores the conditions of detention, detention, and punishment in Syrian prisons, through live re-enactment, and in the manner of narration of testimonies, the recipient film addresses questions about human violence and the purpose and feasibility of human practices in repression and torture. Civilizations, and across the ages.

This article is mainly based on a text written about the film by Jeanne Galké in L'orient Le Jour. (Text link)  

This movie is available online. 

I have not seen it nor do I want to.