It’s a sobering thought: Potentially the more people who see City of Ghosts, the more its subjects’ lives are endangered.
The documentary chronicles the courageous efforts of Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, a grassroots collective of underground journalists working in the ISIS stronghold in eastern Syria, revealing the atrocities and severe oppression by the terrorist regime that controls a once-proud city.
Some in RBSS have already died for the cause. Some have understandably fled. Yet those who remain are determined to continue pursuing the truth, despite constant death threats.
By allowing themselves to be interviewed and tracked on camera, faces and all, it increases the likelihood of further persecution in an environment that already forces them to work in secret.
“We had very frank conversations about the ramifications of taking part in the film,” said director Matthew Heineman. “The guys understood that. But they didn’t want to hide behind the veneer of social media. They didn’t want to be avatars. They wanted to show their faces, that they’re real people from Raqqa. These are moderate Muslim men trying to fight this perversion of their own religion. It was important to them to come out from behind the shadows.”
Heineman knew that acquiring footage would rely on a partnership. He said he met with the Syrian journalists at a foreign border, but otherwise couldn’t reveal how he received their exclusive footage for the film, some of which reveals brutal violence and egregiously negligent living conditions that contradict ISIS accounts.
“I was never able to go to Raqqa. I would have been killed instantly,” Heineman said by phone. “They were already publishing a lot of this footage online. A fair amount of footage you see in the film is already available with a little bit of searching. The group has encrypted ways to smuggle footage out of Raqqa.”
Heineman’s first exposure to the group came via a 2015 article in the New Yorker, which the filmmaker read while promoting his previous film, Cartel Land. He reached out to the members of RBSS, and a week later, started filming.
But while the concept might seem simple on the surface, Heineman admits — as is often the case with documentary filmmaking — the project took some unexpected turns along the way, exploring fresh ideas and offering deeper context.
“You need to be open to the story changing and evolving,” he said. “I wanted to explore this war of ideas, this war of propaganda and information. The film became much more than that for me. It became an immigrant story of those who were forced to flee. It became a story of finding oneself in a new land. It became a story of nationalism in Europe, and a story about the cumulative effects of trauma.”
Heineman, 33, knows the film’s level of violence can be shocking and off-putting, but he said it’s meant to convey authenticity rather than exploit the ongoing conflict.
“I wanted to go on a visceral, emotional journey, and hopefully in doing so have a tiny bit more empathy for what’s happening with this group, in Raqqa, and in Syria,” Heineman said. “The citizens of Raqqa have lived and are living through violence that we can’t imagine. They’re seeing things that are unimaginable. To not show the violence would have been doing an injustice to the horror and the fear that they live with every single day.”
Like the film itself, Heineman takes an even-handed perspective with regard to how the worldwide political climate impacts the plight of RBSS. But he hopes moviegoers will find their tenacious crusade both eye-opening and inspiring.
“I don’t necessarily find hope in politicians or in governments to affect change. I find hope in individuals who are standing up and fighting against evil,” he said. “It’s an homage to journalism and people who are fighting for the truth. It’s important to celebrate those who are risking their lives in pursuit of exposing the dark corners of the world that we would otherwise not get to see.”
