Date and Time: Thursday, July 24, 2025, 7:00 - 8:30 PM (Damascus Time)

Location: Via Zoom 

Language: Arabic with English translation, discussion is in both Arabic and English

Moderator: Mina Ibrahim

The MENA Prison Forum is pleased to host the third session of its 2025 talk series "Prison Matters: Towards Justice in Syria" with Waleed Al Madani, Syrian documentary filmmaker.

The talk will focus on Al Madani’s recent documentation of multiple prison and detention centers in Syria following the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024. Drawing from his personal archive and his ongoing film project Testahbis, Al Madani has been sharing moments captured inside these former sites of state violence, spaces that have come to symbolize both brutality and fragile hope. His work includes long form audio testimonies and film photography with survivors of arbitrary detention under the former regime. It reflects a personal and collective effort to understand a system that has shaped the lives of millions of Syrians since the enforcement of the 1962 Emergency Law, a law that enabled arbitrary detention, torture, and enforced disappearance in Syria. 

This discussion will explore the urgency of documenting the Syrian detention experience as part of the broader pursuit of transitional justice and the guarantees of non-recurrence. It will specifically engage with the importance of narratives and storytelling in visual and sonic testimony forms in both bringing to light the experiences and preserving memories around enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention. It will also address the ethical and political considerations and challenges of documenting these experiences and spaces after liberation. 

Waleed Al Madani is a Syrian documentary filmmaker. He has a DOC NOMADS Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s Degree in Documentary Filmmaking and is a Visiting Scholar with the Music and Sound Cultures research group at NYU Abu Dhabi. He works as a freelancer in the fields of film editing and documentary film in the UAE and is currently working on his first feature on the experience of detention and torture during the Syrian Ba’ath regime.

“Prison Matters: Towards Justice in Syria” is a series of conversations hosted by the MENA Prison Forum in 2025. Through the voices of former detainees, families of victims, key activists, artists, and legal experts, the series reflects on justice work inside and outside Syria, and the evolving challenges facing transitional justice.