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‘City of Ghosts’: This is what heroic journalism looks like

By Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post
Published: July 28, 2017, 6:05am

American audiences have enjoyed a recent spate of documentaries that take us beyond headlines and just-the-facts news stories about the Islamic State, Iraq and Syria, and that give us, instead, a glimpse of the people whose lives have been so viciously upended by militancy’s rise in the Middle East.

Last week, it was “Nowhere to Hide,” offering a candid portrait of the decimation of Jalawla, Iraq, through the eyes of a gentle-natured medic and family man. This week, it’s “City of Ghosts,” providing an apt bookend chronicling the heroic efforts of citizen journalists in Raqqa, Syria, as they attempt to document the carnage that the Islamic State has wreaked on their city.

In 2014, when the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, invaded Syria, a group of teachers, students and professionals began filming the atrocities performed by the group, which included public executions and torture. Because the international press was largely ignoring what was happening in Raqqa, the anonymous activists began to disseminate their images via social media, eventually becoming known as the undercover group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently.

As the Syria story heated up, RBSS’s electronic missives became more widespread in the mainstream media, while the Islamic State honed its own once-primitive communications techniques into slick videos borrowing production values and story beats from computer games and Hollywood movies. “City of Ghosts” chronicles that history, and, when one of RBSS’ leaders is suddenly killed, the subsequent escape of several members to Turkey and Germany. In exile, they try to protect their sources back home while making sure the stories of Raqqa — and Syria at large — reach a wider audience, battling psychological and emotional trauma while becoming the toasts of Western human rights and free-press advocates.

Directed by Matthew Heineman with breathtaking access and urgency, “City of Ghosts” possesses the same taut, cinemav?rit? energy as his previous film “Cartel Land.” Like that movie, this is a work of nerve and immediacy, with the filmmaker gaining unprecedented proximity to the life-threatening events he’s recording. There are moments when the film plays like a soberingly real-life international thriller.

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