Tawfik Sabouni (director and Saidnaya prison survivor) premieres The Other Side of the Sun at Berlinale and presents an unflinching reenactment of incarceration at Syria’s infamous prison.
Located roughly thirty kilometres north of Damascus, Sednaya Prison became one of the most notorious detention centres of the Assad regime. Primarily used to incarcerate political opponents, activists, and civilians swept up in mass arrests following the Syrian uprising of 2011, it developed a reputation for systematic torture, starvation, and enforced disappearance. Tens of thousands of detainees passed through its corridors; many never emerged. For years, Sednaya existed as both physical site and symbol as a closed institution whose violence was widely reported yet structurally concealed.
The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024 altered that status. Prison gates were forced open. Detainees were released. Spaces long sealed by state secrecy became accessible. It was in this immediate aftermath that Belgian-Syrian filmmaker Tawfik Sabouni, himself a former prisoner of Sednaya, returned to the site of his captivity with four fellow survivors. The Other Side of the Sun emerges from that return. Rather than construct a conventional historical account, the film stages reenactments within the prison’s actual walls, allowing those who endured its regime to re-enter and re-narrate the architecture that once disciplined them.
The premise is stark: survivors revisiting the intact structure of their imprisonment to confront memory in situ. The stakes, however, extend beyond personal testimony. Sednaya represents not only a site of national trauma but a concentrated example of how institutions can erase identity through procedure. By situating reenactment inside the physical remains of that system, the film transforms a space designed for disappearance into a space of reclamation.
The Other Side of the Sun resists the frame that most films about political imprisonment inherit by default. It does not start with geopolitics, nor does it unfold as a conventional exposé. There are no maps situating Sednaya within a digestible chronology of dictatorship. No experts translate the regime’s brutality into policy language. Instead, the film narrows its focus. It restores scale. What emerges is not a portrait of Syria as abstraction, but an encounter with five men whose bodies once passed through an institution designed to erase them.
That refusal of abstraction is the film’s first intervention. Contemporary Western media coverage of Middle Eastern conflict frequently reduces violence to urgency and suffering to spectacle, flattening experience into the vocabulary of crisis. Tawfik Sabouni’s documentary moves deliberately in the opposite direction. Written and directed by a survivor of Sednaya prison, it does not translate trauma for an external audience; it reclaims it from within. Authorship here is not incidental. It is structural. The film’s authority derives from lived experience, and that shift alters its ethical geometry. This is not testimony mediated through distance. It is memory re-entering the space that attempted its annihilation.
The central formal device is reenactment. After the fall of Assad’s regime, Sabouni returns to Sednaya with four fellow former detainees. They walk its corridors. They re-enter its cells. They stage, with restraint, the rituals that once organised their captivity. Reenactment here is neither theatrical flourish nor documentary embellishment. It is confrontation. The architecture that once disciplined their bodies becomes the site of counter-performance. Where the prison formerly observed, classified, and regulated them, the film now observes the prison itself.
Michel Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary institutions in Discipline and Punish remains instructive. The modern prison, he argues, does not merely confine; it produces. Through surveillance, repetition, hierarchy, and ritual, it creates what he termed “docile bodies.” These are individuals made legible and manageable within a system of power. Sednaya, as evoked in the film, operated within precisely such a logic. Its violence was systematic rather than chaotic, procedural rather than spectacular. Uniforms established distance. Silence enforced obedience. Starvation and humiliation functioned not as deviations from order, but as instruments of it. The horror lay not only in brutality, but in organisation.
The Other Side of the Sun does not illustrate that structure through archival evidence or didactic explanation. It reveals it through embodiment. By returning to Sednaya’s intact architecture, the film makes visible the spatial logic of discipline. Corridors narrow the frame. Walls impose geometry. Bodies are positioned within a design once intended to fragment and regulate them. Yet the reenactment destabilises that design. The men who were once rendered visible only as prisoners reappear as narrators. They move deliberately, speak deliberately, occupy space deliberately. Reenactment becomes counter-discipline, an insistence that presence can reassert itself within the very system that sought to erase it.
It would be possible to misread this strategy as therapeutic reenactment or as an appeal to emotional devastation. Such readings flatten the film’s ambition. The reenactments are restrained to the point of austerity. There is no orchestration of spectacle, no cinematic escalation designed to overwhelm. The camera observes rather than sensationalises. The film declines the critical vocabulary so often attached to depictions of atrocity — “harrowing”, “gut-wrenching”, “urgent”. Instead, it locates its force in structure. The violence of Sednaya is not dramatised; it is contextualised within a system that made it administratively possible.
This distinction matters. Films about imprisonment frequently risk reproducing the spectacle of suffering, inviting viewers to consume trauma as proof of moral engagement. Sabouni’s documentary resists that economy. It offers neither cathartic outrage nor voyeuristic horror. What it presents instead is a study of how institutions warehouse bodies. The term is not hyperbolic. In modern disciplinary systems, individuals become inventory — catalogued, contained, stripped of distinction. Identity is reduced to number, to classification, to administrative entry. The prison does not only remove freedom; it fragments personhood.
Against this fragmentation, the film stages specificity. Alongside recollections of deprivation and humiliation, the men speak of their mothers’ cooking, of first love, of favourite films, of driving through Damascus. These details might appear tangential to political incarceration. They are not. They are acts of ontological reclamation. Systems of discipline function by erasing nuance; identity survives through accumulation. Each remembered detail interrupts abstraction. Each recollection reconstitutes the self that the institution sought to dissolve.
Viktor Frankl, reflecting on survival under extreme conditions, argued that meaning can persist even when freedom is stripped away. In The Other Side of the Sun, meaning does more than persist; it is externalised. The memories that sustained these men internally are staged within the architecture that once confined them. Interior resistance becomes visible. The reenactment does not merely reproduce trauma; it materialises survival. If Foucault reveals how institutions produce compliant bodies, Sabouni demonstrates how those bodies can reassert authorship.
The film’s position within the documentary canon clarifies its distinctiveness. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah rejected archival footage, insisting that the Holocaust not be illustrated without diminishing its gravity. Testimony and landscape bore the burden of memory. Absence spoke through language. Sabouni’s work shares Lanzmann’s suspicion of spectacle, yet it collapses the distance between survivor and site. Presence, not absence, occupies the frame. The walls of Sednaya are not invoked through recollection alone; they are re-entered.
Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing employed reenactment to expose the psychology of perpetrators intoxicated by their own narratives of power. There, theatricality revealed moral emptiness. In The Other Side of the Sun, reenactment operates along an inverse axis. It is not the powerful who perform, but those once rendered powerless. The performances are stripped of flourish. They refuse myth. If Oppenheimer’s film interrogates the spectacle of impunity, Sabouni’s interrogates the endurance of dignity.
Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture reconstructed genocide through clay figurines, foregrounding the impossibility of recovering archival truth. Artificiality became an acknowledgment of absence. Sabouni initially conceived of building a prison set to approximate Sednaya when access remained impossible. The subsequent fall of the regime altered that plan. The reenactment moved from studio to site. That shift is decisive. The film does not simulate space; it reoccupies it. The architecture is neither metaphor nor reconstruction. It is the same architecture that once regulated breath and movement. The return occurs before the walls have ossified into monument or museum. Memory confronts materiality without mediation.
This immediacy strengthens the film against a potential counter-argument: that reenactment risks aestheticising trauma. The charge is not trivial. Documentary history contains examples where reenactment blurs ethical boundaries. Yet Sabouni’s formal restraint counters that risk. There is no stylisation designed to embellish suffering. The camera remains patient, often static. Sound design avoids manipulation. The men’s gestures are measured, unembellished. The reenactments do not dramatise cruelty; they expose routine. By foregrounding structure over spectacle, the film sidesteps the accusation of exploitation.
Another possible critique concerns universality. To suggest that the institutional logic depicted in Sednaya is transferable beyond Syria might appear to dilute specificity. Yet the film itself invites structural comparison without erasing context. Modern history is replete with systems that reduce bodies to inventory: the gulags of the Soviet Union, Latin American detention centres under military rule, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and the bureaucratised violence embedded within mass incarceration elsewhere. Recognising structural recurrence does not flatten difference; it illuminates pattern. The film’s refusal to generalise Syria paradoxically enables broader recognition. By narrowing its lens to five men within one building, it exposes a logic that exceeds geography.
The documentary’s lasting contribution lies in this recalibration of attention. It demonstrates that dehumanisation is rarely chaotic. It is designed. It is embedded in architecture, in hierarchy, in repetition. It is normalised through routine. And because it is designed, it can recur. The warehousing of bodies is not an anomaly of history; it is a recurring temptation within modern governance. What interrupts that logic is not spectacle, but specificity. Identity, rendered granular and irreducible, resists abstraction.
For audiences saturated with images of distant conflict, this recalibration is essential. The film does not demand tears as proof of engagement. It demands recognition. It shifts the viewer’s gaze from the exceptional to the procedural, from the event to the system, from geopolitical narrative to embodied presence. The prison is not presented as an incomprehensible aberration. It is revealed as a machine with discernible parts. To understand that machine is to confront its portability.
In the end, The Other Side of the Sun does not simply document what occurred within Sednaya’s walls. It exposes the logic that made those walls effective. By returning human presence to their interior, it interrupts that logic. The men who once moved through the prison as anonymous detainees now traverse it as authors of their own narrative. The institution sought to discipline their bodies into compliance and erase their identities into anonymity. The film restores both movement and name.
That restoration is neither sentimental nor symbolic. It is structural. In reclaiming space, in reclaiming detail, in reclaiming authorship, the film expands the documentary canon’s understanding of reenactment. It demonstrates that reenactment can function not as spectacle or confession, but as reclamation. It can transform architecture into archive. It can turn the site of erasure into the site of testimony.
Such an intervention does not depend on rhetorical urgency to endure. Its force lies in precision. By narrowing its focus to five men and one building, The Other Side of the Sun reveals the fragility of systems that rely on abstraction and the resilience of identity that resists it. In doing so, it secures its place within a lineage of films that confront power not through denunciation alone, but through form.
The Other Side of the Sun premiered at Berlinale 2026.
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