A portrait of ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad torn in the city of Aleppo, in northern Syria, on Nov. 30, 2024. (Credit: Omar Haj Kadour/AFP)
On Dec. 8, 2024, the Assad dictatorship collapsed. In Damascus, people filmed the fall of a regime whose end an entire nation experienced firsthand. From France, Cécile Boëx followed the revolution and the subsequent war, image by image. A researcher specializing in videos documenting the uprising and the war, Boëx lived in Damascus from 2001 to 2011. She performed in theater productions, wrote her dissertation, and gave birth to her son there. Forced to leave Syria, she eventually mourned the loss of any hope of returning.In May and December 2025, Boëx returned to Damascus with a film camera and a recorder, finding a city that still stood but had become unrecognizable. In "Finding Damascus" (Actes Sud, 240 pages, October 2026), a first-person account written “in the heat of the aftermath,” she encounters friends who stayed...
On Dec. 8, 2024, the Assad dictatorship collapsed. In Damascus, people filmed the fall of a regime whose end an entire nation experienced firsthand. From France, Cécile Boëx followed the revolution and the subsequent war, image by image. A researcher specializing in videos documenting the uprising and the war, Boëx lived in Damascus from 2001 to 2011. She performed in theater productions, wrote her dissertation, and gave birth to her son there. Forced to leave Syria, she eventually mourned the loss of any hope of returning.In May and December 2025, Boëx returned to Damascus with a film camera and a recorder, finding a city that still stood but had become unrecognizable. In "Finding Damascus" (Actes Sud, 240 pages, October 2026), a first-person account written “in the heat of the aftermath,” she encounters friends who...
