Together with ALFILM – Arab Film Festival Berlin, medico international, and UMAM Documentation and Research (UMAM D&R), the MPF is presenting a special event in HAU with a focus on Syria. The event will include a film screening of the film “Tadmor” and a discussion afterwards with one of the film’s directors, Monika Borgmann, and one of the film’s protagonists, former detainee Ali Abu Dehn. 

With the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 came images of freed detainees from Syria’s gruesome prisons flooding our screens.The present moment is a crucial one to shed the light on the inner workings of this intricate system and to explore the traumatic experiences of those who were held and tortured by it.

Directed by Monika Borgmann and Lokman Slim, Lebanon/Qatar/UAE/France/Switzerland, 2016, 103 minutes, Arabic with English subtitles. 

Amidst the popular uprising against the Syrian regime that began in 2011, a group of former Lebanese detainees decides to break their long-held silence about the horrific years they spent imprisoned in Tadmor (Palmyra), one of the Assad regime's most dreadful prisons. They decide to testify publicly about the systematic torture and humiliation they experienced. To reclaim and overcome this dark chapter in their lives, they rebuild Tadmor in an abandoned school near Beirut. By playing the role of both "victim" and "victimizer," they will relive their experiences of both suffering and survival.