Ramzi Choukair

Riyad Avlar is Turkish. In 1996, he goes to Syria to study Arabic. Arrested by intelligence services, accused of being a spy, he spends twenty-one years in captivity. His story leads to Shevan’s, Syrian of Jewish and Armenian origins, young activist of the 2011 revolution and a refugee in the Netherlands, and to Hend’s, militant of the opposition in the 80s, incarcerated for eight years under Hafez El-Assad’s regime. Riyad, Shevan, Hend, Alaa, Jamal, each of these individual stories open on another, on hundreds, thousands of others. These striking testimonies of life and captivity make up the plot of Y-Saidnaya, second opus of a trilogy that tries to decrypt the global system ruling Syria, the imbrication between political power, religion, corruption, oppression. By reconstituting situations, by embodying the absents, fiction comes to shed light on this shifting context and bring forward keys to better understand it.