Megan Mylan’s latest documentary feature takes a humble idea — telling intimate and humanizing stories of Syrian families affected by their home country’s civil war — and achieves it on a nakedly ambitious scale. Filmed over five years in five separate countries, “Simple as Water” is...

Syrian singer Sabah Fakhri, considered one of the most famous in the Arab world, died in Damascus on Tuesday at the age of 88, his son told AFP. "He died a natural death in Damascus. His heart stopped beating," said Anas Fakhri, lamenting his father's passing as a "huge loss for Syrian art."...

A new Russian film tackles one of the country’s great taboos: the role of Russian mercenaries in trouble spots around the world and the toll this takes on the family members of the often unacknowledged soldiers who die in combat. “Mama, I’m Home”, produced by Alexander Rodnyansky,...

Nobel literature laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah on Friday criticized the “lack of compassion” of governments, including Britain’s, that treat migrants as a problem or a threat. Gurnah grew up on the island of Zanzibar, now part of Tanzania, and arrived in England as an 18-year-old refugee...