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Syria is rare country where Muslims, Christians ‘truly & honestly’ co-exist – filmmaker to RT ‘Easiest to blame one side’: Actress-turned-filmmaker decries West’s ‘double standards’ in Syria
(about 7 hours later)
A Bolivian filmmaker who traveled to Syria to experience the war-torn country firsthand says it is full of Christians and Muslims who effortlessly co-exist and want their country to hold onto its secularism – despite what the media portrays. Carla Ortiz, a Bolivian screen star, who has become a documentary maker, says the West is looking for easy answers and simple solutions in its approach to Syria where she has spent 18 months filming a documentary.
Carla Ortiz, the director of the “The Voice of Syria” documentary, traveled to Syria to shed light on the everyday people who are simply trying to get by in a country which has long served as the setting of a brutal civil war that has claimed countless lives. The 38-year-old told RT the big countries were immediately prejudiced in their view of Bashar Assad’s government as soon as the conflict broke out in 2011.
When asked what inspired her to travel to Syria, Ortiz told RT that she had been “surprised” that the majority of the information received regarding the situation was from refugees who had fled, and that most of the news was from rebel-held areas. “There’s always a double standard towards small nations, because it is the law of existence that the big fish eats the small fish,” she said in an interview with RT Deutsch to talk about her experience while filming “Voice of Syria”, a documentary that she hopes will give a more authentic insider portrait of the conflict.
“I was always wondering, what about the rest of the people? What about the people who are not holding weapons? What about the people that are just there, caught in the conflict?” Six years ago, Ortiz was immediately glued to her screen, but believed that even avid news watchers weren’t getting the true picture.
Ortiz said her visit taught her that Syrians want what everyone else wants: peace. The filmmaker, who has lived in the US for more than a decade, says the coverage was not only distorted by media biases, but by hearing stories predominantly from those who fled the country, or had a vested interest in denigrating the government, rather than those who stayed at home and stayed loyal.
“They want to be able to have their lives back. They don't want war, they want to be able to send their children to school. Students want to be able to go to universities without having to be bombed, they want to rebuild their lives.” “In the Western world we are so busy, and the world is moving so fast, we don’t have the time to understand conflicts happening in other parts of the world,” she says.
Most importantly, however, Syrians “want to keep their unity and their secularism.” The actress, who rose to fame as a result of her parts in Mexican telenovelas, is less charitable towards some world leaders, who she says have been “impulsive” and “have directly or indirectly supported terrorism in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Libya, as well as South America.”
She credited Syria as being “probably one of the very few countries you will see in the world where Muslims and Christians truly and honestly are not just united, but they are somehow co-existing and living.” To Ortiz, the turn from “moderate rebels” funded by the West to “radical Islamists” to potential future terrorists attacking Western cities is predictable, and she laments the enthusiasm with which the US and its allies picked sides in the conflict.
“They don't want to talk about religion, they want to be referred to as Syrians,” she added. “It’s easier to put the blame on one side, and not remember our own actions, and see that we can fix the situation if we understand the root of the problem,” she says of the US-led coalition’s approach to resolving a conflict that is thought to have claimed more than 400,000 lives thus far.
However, Ortiz noted that the rest of the world receives an opposite message from the media, which often portrays those in the country as “fighting for religious matters.” After watching from afar, she decided to tackle what has been the biggest news story in the world over the past half-decade, “talking to men, women and children, those who are for the government, and against it.”
The filmmaker, who says she “fell in love” with the culture and people of Syria, says she is now in the beginning stages of shooting a documentary on North Korea, and also hopes to make a film in war-torn Yemen. Apart from the practical difficulties of filming in wartime, Ortiz thought she would finish telling their story “in two, maybe three” trips, instead of living in and out of the country almost constantly since March 2016, when she first landed in Damascus.
Once inside Syria, all preconceptions quickly evaporated.
“I tried to get back to basics, and understand the conflict from the point of view of the people and what they stand for,” she says of her approach during filming.
With the media more interested in highlighting the ideological differences between the various factions in the country, Ortiz said that after six years, most Syrians “want to be able to have their lives back. They don't want war, they want to be able to send their children to school. Students want to be able to go to universities without having to be bombed, they want to rebuild their lives.”
In her experience, and for most civilians, the longing for normality transcends the religious and sectarian divides, and she notes that Syria has successfully sustained a multi-faith society for thousands of years.
“This is one of the few countries in the world where Muslims and Christians are united,” says Ortiz. “They want to keep their unity and their secularism, and many are angry that outsiders are always talking about their religion. They don’t want to talk about their religion, and they want to be referred to as Syrians.”
Ortiz said she hopes her 'Voice of Syria' documentary will provide a more authentic insider portrait of the conflict.
Ortiz, says that she “fell in love” with Syria and is not taking a break. She plans to make a documentary about Yemen, another conflict she believes has not been covered adequately, and then to go beyond sensationalist filmmaking and find the true face of North Korea.