Amid the Debris of Homs, a Guerrilla Is Born

Among the dwindling holdouts in the rebel-held Old City neighborhood of Homs, an area of the devastated Syrian city that international relief officials are trying to evacuate, is the former star goalkeeper of the national soccer team, transformed over three years from a pacifist antigovernment protest leader into a homegrown guerrilla fighter.

The former goalkeeper, Abdul Basset Saroot, saw colleagues die from army sniper bullets and disappear in government detention. He suffered a grievous leg wound and, his friends say, is now surviving on well water and seven olives a day.

Mr. Saroot, considered a terrorist by President Bashar al-Assad’s government, is the main character in a new film, “Return to Homs,” which made its United States debut last month at the Sundance Film Festival. In a surprise, it won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, catapulting the film and its creators to a new level of international recognition.

“I didn’t expect genuine interest in the film,” said Orwa Nyrabia, 36, an accomplished Syrian cinematographer who co-produced the film and showed it recently at a New York screening arranged by the Open Society Foundations, a human rights group. In an interview, Mr. Nyrabia said he and the Syrian director, Talal Derki, had not even been sure they could enter the film at Sundance because they had no credit cards to pay the online registration fees.

“What was good is that the team of Sundance waived the fees,” Mr. Nyrabia said.

Shot between 2011 and 2013 and distilled from 300 hours of footage into 87 minutes, “Return to Homs” chronicles the Syrian conflict as seen largely through the eyes of Mr. Saroot, a 19-year-old goalkeeper and singer who put aside soccer to lead protests against President Assad in Homs, Mr. Saroot’s hometown and long a cradle of anti-Assad grievances. The early scenes show Mr. Saroot orchestrating chants against Mr. Assad at street rallies during the first giddy months of the conflict, energized by the infectious spirit of Arab Spring revolts in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. 

Using an assortment of digital cameras including Handycams, Mr. Derki and Mr. Nyrabia captured raw scenes of combat, dead children and grieving parents, as well as Mr. Saroot’s singing, serious injuries and moments of despair. The filmmakers followed Mr. Saroot and his colleagues, documenting the government’s increasingly violent response to their resistance, their decision to arm themselves, the shelling and bombing that razed their homes and their day-to-day struggle, scrounging for food and clothes abandoned by civilians who fled what had become a war zone.

Mr. Nyrabia said the filmmakers had spent much of the time living with Mr. Saroot and his friends in the rubble of their neighborhood, recharging their phones and laptops from car batteries and portable gasoline generators. They risked their lives to sneak in and out past army checkpoints, and taught Mr. Saroot’s colleagues how to use Handycams when it became too dangerous for the filmmakers to remain in Homs. The footage was smuggled out.

Orwa Nyrabia, Syrian cinematographer

There were some lighter moments, Mr. Nyrabia recalled. When a missile hit a street in the Old City neighborhood, the explosion created a crater and ruptured an underground drinking water pipe. “So the big hole became a swimming pool, and all the children started to swim, and it became like their joy in summer,” he said. “These things do happen.”

In recent days, as the United Nations and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent brokered a deal for remaining noncombatants to leave if they wished, Mr. Nyrabia said he had remained in contact with Mr. Saroot and his colleagues. “They’ve been living on seven olives a day each for the past month, and they’re about to run out of olives,” he said.

But Mr. Saroot intends to remain in Homs, Mr. Nyrabia said, and Mr. Saroot’s fighters, who are all from the same neighborhood, know about the film’s increasing recognition. “They celebrated,” he said, “although nobody knew what Sundance is.”

The film, which cost about $300,000 to produce and was financed partly through European grants, made its original debut in Amsterdam last year. But the Sundance prize attracted enormous attention and there are now plans to show the film in 40 countries in the next three months, Mr. Nyrabia said.

Journeyman Pictures, a London-based documentary cinema distribution and production company, announced on Wednesday in a Twitter posting that it had secured worldwide rights to the film.

While Mr. Derki managed to leave Syria without a problem, Mr. Nyrabia was detained at the Damascus airport on Aug. 23, 2012, and later accused of making a film with a terrorist. He was held for three weeks by military intelligence in an underground prison, he said, thrown together with 84 younger Syrians, most of them conscripts apparently reluctant to shoot fellow Syrians. “They had blinked before shooting,” he said.

His fellow inmates were deferential, Mr. Nyrabia said. “They wouldn’t make me queue for the bathroom because I was considered very old.”

Mr. Nyrabia, who now lives in Berlin, attributed his release to pressure on the Syrian government from international publicity about his disappearance. A group of prominent filmmakers and Hollywood celebrities including Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, along with members of 24 international and American cinema associations and unions, signed a petition demanding that the Syrian authorities free Mr. Nyrabia.

While Syria’s government routinely ignores demands by Western political leaders, Mr. Nyrabia said, “when it’s De Niro or Scorsese, that’s embarrassing.”