5 Seasons of Revolution Review: Raw Reports From a Civil War Front

Publish date: 2024-03-09

Young journalist-activists record Syria’s rapid unraveling in this forceful record of an ongoing conflict’s early years.

The sensation of a nation crumbling from within — not in slo-mo deterioration, but amid the chaos of widespread violence and political upheaval — is unimaginable to most people. Yet it’s something many will live to experience. Offering a primer of sorts in that grim prospect is “5 Seasons of Revolution.” Made by the pseudonymous Lina, this very first-person documentary doesn’t offer a lot of explanatory background or big-picture commentary on Syria’s still-ongoing civil war. But in charting the filmmaker’s attempts at reportage alongside the fates of her imperiled group of friends between 2011-15, it provides one vivid perspective on a whole country in freefall. 

At that timespan’s beginning, the pro-democracy protests of the Arab Spring reach our English-language narrator’s homeland, where she’s an aspiring video journalist. Her likewise twentysomething close associates, introduced at the start here, are fellow journalists, social workers, activists. All grew up in a de facto police state now controlled by President Bashar al-Assad, whose father presided over the country’s transformation into a military dictatorship decades prior. Defying an official media blackout, she interviews demonstrators and those who witnessed their being fired on by government forces. We see joyful still images of street actions, suggesting a turning point may be at hand.

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Unfortunately, things turn in the wrong direction. The regime ramps up brutality against dissenters elsewhere, while maintaining a tight grip on Damascus, where things incongruously remain “business as usual.” Lina and “camera mate” Bassel visit Homs to record the violence there. The likelihood of arrest for such activities leads her to start adopting aliases: Lina remains “an upper class girl from the capital,” ostensibly apolitical, traveling simply to visit friends or family. She does her reporting under the name Maya, goes as Maiss among activist circles, while presenting herself as Layla to filmmaking colleagues. Nonetheless, such tactics are hardly failsafe: At various points she, like her friends, is subject to “detainment,” interrogation, even torture. 

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As the years tick by, hopes of democracy recede and murderous calamity spreads. Defecting soldiers who refuse to shoot demonstrators form the Free Syrian Army. But as disorder only heightens, that resistance faction becomes compromised by forced cooperation with foreign powers. (Meanwhile, Assad is propped up by Russia, something protagonists here find physical proof of.) Destruction is no longer something at a safe remove. 

By the fifth “season” of her chronicle, Lina has become “a reduced reporter, a reduced activist, even a reduced person” — her connectivity to the outside world threadbare as Syria’s own air force bombs nearby neighborhoods, and eventually roadblocks prevent her accessing her home. After a trip to beleaguered Aleppo gets her imprisoned for six weeks, she’s released on her 30th birthday, realizing she’ll soon have to join the refugee exodus that will constitute a global crisis. In a verbal postscript, we learn few of her circle remain in Syria — among those still alive, that is. 

Though there is occasional outside news footage showing large-scale ruination, “5 Seasons of Revolution” primarily sticks with its protagonists’ immediate experience. This affords moments of relative normalcy or desperate cheer in which they enjoy what’s left of their class privilege — albeit not for long. If there is not much graphic evidence of warfare and human rights abuses here, that only makes the exceptions more jolting, as when we spy among battered ranks of just-released political detainees a man whose bare foot has clearly had a nail or spike driven through it. Civilian massacres that do not spare children are no less real for simply being described in passing.

Despite its almost diaristic nature, the film is matter-of-fact enough to avoid dramatizing any further a rather harrowing narrative — the courage of its participants both identified and otherwise is evident enough. Lina’s friends are willing to risk all in order to save a homeland that, alas, ultimately forces most of them to flee, and seems no closer to peace years later. While “5 Revolutions” is not an ideal starting place for those unfamiliar with the general conflict’s origins, tangled politics or international repercussions, it provides a powerfully universal sense of life and resistance within such extreme circumstances.

The identities of various figures here are sometimes obscured by deepfake or more-conspicuous blurring technology, further pressing awareness that this recent history is far from over. For the most part, image and sound quality are better than one might expect. While well-shaped in editorial terms, this engrossing document’s unvarnished gist is reinforced by the lack of any musical scoring. 

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‘5 Seasons of Revolution’ Review: Raw Reports From a Civil War Front

Reviewed online, April 27, 2023. In Hot Docs, Sundance film festivals. Running time: 95 MIN.

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