Teach Voices from Syria: Media Studies. By Andrea Duffour

Andrea Duffour is a professor of cinema and the President of Friendship Association Switzerland-Cuba, section Fribourg, Switzerland,
as well as a delegate in the 3rd International Forum of Solidarity with Syrian people and workers against Imperialist Interventions, Blockades and Terrorism,
in Damascus, Sept. 8-9 2019

See her Report here:
https://www.cuba-si.ch/fr/lassociation-suisse-cuba-damas-syrie-rapport-photos/

Theme: War Propaganda

Instructions: Write a journal from the point of view of a grown up Sama.

Here’s what I suggest you do after having seen the film “for Sama”, here in Switzerland (put it on French wiki and see the consensus it obtained!!! )

« For Sama » film (2019) : ( trailer : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsvBqtg2RM0)

Exemplar by Andrea Duffour

Open letter to my mother :


Sama responds to her mother :

Dear mom,

We are in 2035 and I’m 19 years old now, the age you were when you took your first political directions. I thank you for all the love that you have given me. In your film, For Sama (2019), I am the protagonist, a little baby. I cry every time I see this movie, with the atrocities you showed, you chose to touch the emotions of any normal person. But why did you make us think that it was the Syrian army that occupied Aleppo and was shooting at its own people?

At some point in the movie, you wonder if one day I will blame you for not having left Aleppo at the beginning of this war or if I will reproach you for having left it after its liberation? I can answer you now: I blame you for both!

I can understand your love for my dad and his group and your youthful blindness to your youthful demands for “a free Syria” – even though that the same Syria had given you excellent education and health system for free. It is normal for educated people to be critical and to have demands. (A true dictator has no interest in educating his people and would not last two months without the support of his own people.) I also can imagine that it is difficult for you to admit that you were mistaken – used, even – in view of the extent of the aggression, which our country suffered. But I am diverging; I will now answer your question.

I reproach you for not having left East Aleppo when the Syrian and the Russian army had repeatedly proposed guarded departure corridors to all civilians in order to evacuate us from East Aleppo, occupied between 2012-2016 by terrorist gangs, the NATO and Saudi-backed mercenaries destroying it and bombarding dozens of hospitals, the same terrorists who, at the beginning of the few peaceful demonstrations – demonstrations as exist in all the democratic countries of the world, – fired on civilians and policemen with snipers and the aim of provoking international uproar by accusing my government of firing on its own people!

I also criticize your departure abroad when our government with our army had liberated our city, when hundreds of thousands of Syrians sang in the street and returned from abroad. What did they offer you out there to betray your country? Quite simply, I reproach you for the defamation of my country when you became complicit and joined the wail of European [propaganda] sirens in order to prolong this dirty war and to justify “sanctions” against my people. Sanctions that will affect every child, every individual, every day. Sanctions that will affect people who’ve never attacked anyone.

Mom, I’m still Sama, which means “the sky”; your daughter, who loves freedom, who wants the sovereignty for my beloved Syria. I blame you for using me to make war-propaganda against my own country, for having repeated all the lies about false flag attacks and I now propose you join me, your daughter, and the immense majority of the population who are proud of their country’s army and their government and who lost tens of thousands of young people freeing us from this imperialist-zionist attack.

Mom, I also suggest that you make another movie with your 500 hours of rush. This time letting Syrian people put comments on it instead of your European financiers:
Your material is precious and for this I am grateful !

I am also grateful that you have given me the freedom to return to my country to discover it with my own eyes and I thank you first and foremost for allowing me to express myself.

Aleppo, January 2035,

Your daughter, Sama