Last Men in Aleppo (2017)

Truly Dreadful Film

Let's be realistic.

Expected more

Charming and brutal

"Last Men in Aleppo", is a shattering Danish/Syrian documentary about the Syrian Civil War that should leave you in anger and tears after viewing it. Beginning as a film editor, Syrian writer/director Firas Fayvad previously had made documentaries for television, his most famous being "On the Other Side", the making of which resulted in Fayyad's arrest and torture for nine months between 2011 and 2012. But even that has not achieved the level of international fame "Last Men in Aleppo" has brought him, for it documents the efforts of the White Helmets, an organization consisting of ordinary citizens whose purpose is to save civilians (especially children) who are buried under the rubble from continuous bombings by the Soviet Union unabashedly targeting apartment buildings, hospitals and non-military establishments. What is so shocking about this film is the way it plants the viewer in the middle of the violence as it is happening, and from the point of view of the heroic rescuers. There are deliberate lulls in the film in which we live in the houses with the families of the White Helmets, but that just makes the inhuman tragedy even more shocking when the violence comes. This is a film impossible to forget once seen.

90 people died in April 2017 when sarin gas projectiles were fired into Khan Sheikhun, a rebel-held town in the Idlib province of north-western Syria. of course Russia again used its veto to end an investigation of Syria chemical attacks. more than 1100 children are now suffering from acute malnutrition in the - since 2013 - besieged rebel-held eastern Ghouta where up to 400,000 people are believed to live in one of the last remaining opposition strongholds in Syria. their fate will be grimmer than those in Aleppo where Assad and Putin managed to slaughter thousands.cholera is spreading incredibly fast in Yemen, turning an already dire situation for children into an enormous disaster in the war that is mostly forgotten in the international media. and in Myanmar at the very moment (October 2017) about 600,000 Rohingyas have fled their homes for safety in Bangladesh after a genocide carried out by Myanmar military. survivors have reported summary executions, rape and the wholesale destruction of villages. land mines now line the road out of Myanmar causing even more deaths...the list of the ongoing hells in our world is endless. Aleppo is not over - not even in Aleppo itself where there are still countless bodies rotting in the ruins and many rescue workers and other inhabitants now in Assad's hellholes of prisons where they are daily tortured and then executed. the document in itself is as shocking and repulsive as you might expect but then it is shocking and repulsive at least for a normal human being to see dead babies and children covered in dust being dug up from devastated buildings and crumbled concrete. the document shot in hand-held camera is quite similar to "ambulance/Gaza" by Mohamed Jabaly (2016) which also focused on the desperate work of the rescue crew during the Israelian massacre of July 2014 in Gaza. both are utterly important eyewitness reports and both are sadly recommended.

Tough movie to watch. Tougher to read the reviews of dumb conspiracy theorists who think George Soros can cause solar eclipses and the such. It's actually a remarkably unpolitical film, but follows the day by day lives of firemen in Aleppo. It's pretty tragic, but the humanity of the people in Syria shine through.

I felt really bad after watching this documentary... but I suppose that's the whole point of it - to try and awake our sense of humanity and react politically against these atrocities committed against innocent civilians. I hope our politicians in the West are watching this, but I fear they will not do anything to protect these victims of genocide. The documentary shows the brutal reality of what happened and is still happening in Syria.