“City of Ghosts” depicts the deadly perils of a free press in Syria

Earlier this year, Firas Fayyad’s grueling documentary Last Men in Aleppo profiled the White Helmets, search-and-rescue volunteers working in the titular Syrian city even as civil war reduces it to rubble. Now we have Matthew Heineman’s new feature, City of Ghosts, which portrays the citizen-journalists who struggle to expose the crimes of ISIS in Raqqa. What links these films is not just the Syrian civil war, but the jaw-dropping moral clarity and mortal courage of the men depicted. It’s enough to make an American viewer feels pangs of shame about their own relative timidity.

In Heineman’s celebrated 2015 feature, Cartel Land, the director’s fearlessness was as much the star as the American and Mexican anti-narco vigilantes he profiled. With City of Ghosts, Heineman steps back a bit, allowing his subjects to take the spotlight. The group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS) consists of a handful of unlikely insurgent journalists, most of them diverted from other careers or university studies. When their city fell under the de facto  rule of ISIS’s Salafist jihadists, RBSS organized to smuggle the truth past the group’s wall of fundamentalist propaganda.

City of Ghosts is a story that needs to be told, but there’s no denying that it is a brutal, discouraging tale. Apart from the shocking violence that RBSS captures with its guerrilla camera work—including summary executions—the film’s mood is one of a gradually tightening noose. ISIS’s crackdowns drive most of RBSS’s leadership into Turkey and Germany. Even when abroad, online fatwahs compel the journalists to conceal themselves in safe houses and keep glancing over their shoulders. However, it’s precisely this relentless threat of death that makes RBSS’s unflagging devotion to the free press’ power and obligations so awe-inspiring. It’s a righteousness that gives City of Ghosts a battered, haunted life.

Opens Friday, August 4, at the Tivoli Theatre.