ALEPPO, Syria (AP) — Ramadan in the Arab world is a time of fasting and prayer, but it brings another beloved tradition: the much-anticipated TV drama series shot each year to be aired during the holy month.
After iftar, the evening meal that breaks their daytime fast, families gather to watch their picks from the year’s crop of soap operas and political and historical dramas, snacking on sweets and nuts and drinking tea and coffee until late into the night.
The most anticipated productions are often Syrian. While Egypt is known for its movies and Lebanon for its pop singers and composers, Syria’s TV series have for decades been seen as the gold standard in the region.
As the country emerges from 14 years of civil war, more than a year after Islamist-led insurgents brought the authoritarian Assad dynasty to an end, Syria’s TV industry is seeking its footing in the new order.
A creative outlet fractured
In the Assad years, when political expression was strictly curtailed, “television became the main sort of platform for freedom of expression and also for employment for artists and intellectuals,” an area where they could subtly push boundaries, said Christa Salamandra, a professor of anthropology at Lehman College and the City University of New York who has researched Syrian drama.
In 2011, mass anti-government protests were met by a brutal crackdown and spiraled into civil war.
After that, “the industry fractured,” Salamandra said. “Creatives went into exile — or they stayed, but it split.”
Since Assad’s fall, actors and directors formerly divided along political lines are working together again. Series about once-taboo topics, like torture in Assad’s notorious prisons, are being shot inside Syria.
But like everything in the new Syria, the postwar trajectory of TV drama has been complicated.
Television presenting once-forbidden stories
On a chilly day the week before Ramadan, a television crew had transformed a street in central Aleppo into something magical.
In the background, collapsed buildings were a reminder that the city had been a central battleground in Syria’s civil war, but the cameras had transported the street back to a more innocent age. Classic 1970s cars and a horse-drawn court lined it as a vendor wearing a tarboush hat sold sahlep, a sweet drink of hot thickened milk and spices.
The series — titled “Al-Souriyoun al-Aada” or “The Syrian Enemies” — is based on a novel of the same name that was banned during former Syrian President Bashar Assad’s rule because of its focus on dark moments in Syria’s history, including the “Hama massacre” of 1982.
At the time, then-President Hafez Assad — Bashar Assad’s father — ordered an attack on the city of Hama to quell a rebellion by the Muslim Brotherhood. Between 10,000 and 40,000 people were killed or disappeared in the monthlong assault and siege that left the city in ruins.
In the small-screen version, Yara Sabri, a prominent actor who left the country for years due to her opposition to the autocratic government, appears as the mother of a troubled young man from a rural village who will become a major player in the country’s oppressive security apparatus.
Wissam Rida, who plays her son, said that as a young actor starting out in Damascus, performing alongside exiled stars like Sabri once seemed an impossible dream.
“I used to watch them when I was younger and wish that I could work with them,” he said. After Assad’s fall, Rida said, “They came back with such beautiful energy you can’t imagine, and you can’t imagine how much we were in need of them.”
New authorities lack experience
Still, production has not been without difficulties.
“Al-Souriyoun al-Aada” director Allaith Hajjo is known for shows like “Dayaa Dayaa” (“A Lost Village”), a comedy about life in a small mountain community, and “Intizar” (“Waiting”), a social drama about an impoverished Damascus suburb. He never left Syria.
“In the days of the (Assad) regime’s existence, we were always trying to put forward material that would go over the heads of the censors,” he said.
Back then, “I dealt with actors who were a red line in the eyes of the regime,” Hajjo said. “At the same time, now I am dealing with people who may be rejected” by the current authorities.
The production has been attacked on social media because of the presence of some actors seen as close to Assad. Hajjo said politics should have no role in casting.
He added that the new authorities have little experience in dealing with artistic productions and that the work had run into “some problems” with censors.
“It’s their right to need some time to gain experience, but I hope this time won’t affect the quality and the level” of the output, he said.
The National Drama Committee, the government body responsible for reviewing scripts, did not respond to questions.
The series, originally set to air during Ramadan, has been delayed in production and likely will air after the holy month.
Director Rasha Sharbatji, who shot the Ramadan series “Matbatkh al Medina” (“The City’s Kitchen”), said she had found the new authorities accommodating.
She added that she had met interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa “and he is personally interested in drama and appreciates how important it is.”
But it remains to be seen if his government will permit TV dramas to talk openly about problems that have occurred post-Assad, including outbreaks of sectarian violence in which government forces were implicated.
Salamandra said creators likely will “make serials about the old atrocities with subtle references to the recent ones. Because that’s what they’ve always done.”
Returning to rebuild an industry
Jihad Abdo is among the exiled stars who have returned. A top actor in the 1990s and early 2000s, he fled Syria in 2011 after voicing criticism of Assad.
He started over in the United States, where he begged for entry-level jobs and had to change his name from Jihad — a common name among both Muslim and Christian Arabs that means “striving” — to Jay to work in Hollywood, where many associated “jihad” with extremism.
Eventually he landed roles in some major productions, including with Nicole Kidman in the 2015 film “Queen of the Desert.” But he longed for home.
Now back in Damascus, he appears in the web series “Al-Meqaad al-Akheer” (“The Last Seat”), a social drama airing during Ramadan, as a man struggling with Alzheimer’s. And he now leads Syria’s General Organization for Cinema, where he faces the daunting prospect of rebuilding the Syrian film industry with no budget.
Abdo said that “the margin of the freedom is bigger” than in Assad’s time and the government has not told him that any subject is off limits.
“We’re not sure yet about how this margin of freedom will be shaped,” he said. “We are trying to make it as big as possible, because we need to address the problems in order to solve them.”
Abdo believes the TV industry has a role to play in Syria’s postwar reconciliation by telling human stories and by showing that those with different political views can work together.
“The wound is big, it’s bleeding, it is still open,” he said. “But it’s our responsibility, the people in entertainment, the intellectuals, prominent names, to bring everybody together again and to keep talking, no matter how different we are.”
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Associated Press journalist Omar Sanadiki contributed to this report.
