When Damascus Wrote for the Arabs — A Farewell to Syrian Drama

Everything narrowed… narrowed until it was lost.

This opening line comes from a poem by Syrian poet Nazeeh Abu Afash, performed by Nora Rahal as the theme song for the 2004 series Big Dreams. At the time, it seemed like just a beautiful song. Today, we return to those words not to sing them, but to understand why they have become an elegy.

The Time When Damascus Wrote for the Arabs

There is a fact that requires no argument: at the start of the twenty-first century, Syrian television drama was the most-watched in the Arab world. In 2010 alone, twenty-eight Syrian series aired on twenty-six Arab channels around the world — a phenomenon no other Arab drama industry had ever achieved before or since.

How did this happen? The simple answer is: exceptional talent. The deeper answer is: a rare set of conditions that are very hard to recreate.

The first condition was a quiet institution that rarely gets mentioned: the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts, founded in Damascus in 1977.^[1] From within those walls, an entire generation of actors, writers, and directors emerged. They were trained in the aesthetics of social realism, and driven by one question: how do you tell life as it really is? This generation was not working for fame or entertainment. They were working for something closer to bearing witness.

The second condition is more complex and more controversial. Italian researcher Donatella Della Ratta, who spent years in Damascus studying the drama industry, identified what she called the “whisper strategy” — a fragile, unspoken balance between the state and drama-makers. There was no direct censorship, but there was no full freedom either. Instead, there was a grey negotiating space where creative people worked cleverly, working around restrictions and finding just enough room to produce work of real depth. The regime was not a noble patron of the arts, but it was not an absolute obstacle either. It was — in this reading — a party to a delicate equation. When that equation broke down, the entire industry collapsed with it.^[2]

American researcher Christa Salamandra, who has followed Syrian drama since 1992, described how television in that era was “the primary platform for freedom of expression and for artistic and intellectual employment” — in the absence of a free press or genuine political participation.^[3]

In other words: Syrian drama did not grow despite its context, but within its margins — in the narrow space that context allowed, intentionally or not. And this is exactly what makes the question of its future today much harder than it looks.

Three Names That Tell the Story of a Generation

To understand what happened, we only need to look at the paths of three names from the same generation.

Hatem Ali was born in 1962 in the occupied Golan Heights. He was displaced as a child with his family after 1967, and grew up in the Yarmouk refugee camp. From that beginning — heavy with exile — came a director who had no equal in his ability to turn pain into image. The Four Seasons, Al-Zeer Salem, The Palestinian Exodus, Saladin, Big Dreams, King Farouk, Omar — these works live in Arab collective memory. In 2011, he refused to work on any project about the Syrian crisis, saying that “creativity cannot speak about a political event of this scale before it is over.” By 2018, he was expelled alongside around two hundred other artists from the Syrian Artists’ Union.^[4] On 29 December 2020, he died alone in Cairo at fifty-eight years old, in the middle of preparing a new project he never finished.

This was not just a death. This was an absence that had been completed years before the dying.

Hassan Sami Yusuf was a Palestinian-Syrian writer born in the village of Lubya near Tiberias. His family fled after the Nakba, first to Lebanon, then to Damascus. He studied cinema in Moscow and returned to write some of the most sensitive work Arab television has ever seen. In his collected texts The Threshold of Pain — written during years of creative silence at the start of the crisis — we understood why Syrian drama could not write honestly about what was really happening. “The truth is more embarrassing than a pornographic film at a family dinner,” he wrote, with that particular bitterness that was entirely his own. He later turned those texts into the 2016 series Regret, which became his final major work before funding dried up and doors closed on him, one project after another. He died in Damascus in August 2024 at seventy-nine years old. His last screenplay was never produced.^[5]

What is more painful than his death is the artistic death we forced upon him. We killed his creativity while he was still alive — were we simply practising for his absence?

And then there is Najdat Anzour, born in Aleppo of Circassian origin, the first director to bring the music video format to the Arab world, and the creator of The End of a Brave Man, Al-Jawareh, and Memory of the Body. Between 2016 and 2020, Najdat Anzour served as a member of the Syrian People’s Assembly. A man who started in the same place, in the same industry, ended up on a completely different shore. There is no judgement here — circumstances shape people just as people shape circumstances. But the full picture — Hatem expelled, Hassan silent, Najdat in parliament — is the picture of a generation that fractured from within before the country did.

When the Gulf Became the Real Producer

Before 2011, Syrian drama was funded partly by private Syrian capital and partly by co-productions that were beginning to reach Gulf investors. After 2011, the equation reversed: Gulf funding was no longer a partner — it became a donor with conditions. Those conditions were not always stated openly, but they were always present in writing rooms and production meetings: no Palestinian politics, no scenes that might disturb regional sensitivities, no “Syrian-ness” in the full meaning of that word.

Hassan Sami Yusuf once asked out loud: would Gulf funding accept any content that mentioned Gaza, even in a minor scene? Would it accept a passing reference to 7 October? Was there anyone who wanted a Syrian-Palestinian writer who refused to give up either of those identities? The answer was silent and final. “We Syrians are no longer welcome unless we give up who we are,” he wrote. That single sentence summarises what happened to Syrian drama after 2011 better than any production report could.

This brings to mind a radio interview from 2008, when broadcaster Hiyam al-Hamawi spoke with Lebanese composer Ziyad al-Rahbani, who announced that he could not find funding to record new songs for Fairuz. Nobody believed him. A year later, he said the same thing again. If Fairuz cannot find a producer — then anything is possible. And if the greatest writer in Syrian drama is left with unfinished screenplays and no takers, we are not facing a production crisis. We are facing an existential one.

Ramadan 2026: Revival or Just a Wave?

In the 2026 Ramadan season, there is something worth pausing at. Series are now exploring subjects that were completely forbidden before: the crimes of Saydnaya prison in Exit to the Well, and the brutality of Hafez al-Assad’s coup and the Defence Brigades’ crimes in Hama in The Syrian Enemies, written by Rafi Wahbi and directed by Laith Hajjo.^[6] Twenty-five series, addressing topics that once would have ended careers simply for being written down. That is not a small thing.

But a persistent question remains: who is writing? Who is directing? Who is producing? The conditions that made Syrian drama what it was — a trained generation from the Institute, a functioning production infrastructure, major writers, a careful balance between expression and restriction that produced a distinctive aesthetic — all of these have shifted, disappeared, or literally died. Hatem Ali is gone. Hassan Sami Yusuf is gone. Other writers and directors are scattered across Europe, the Gulf, Turkey, and America.

Director Laith Hajjo, who stands almost alone as the middle generation that maintained some continuity, has said that what is being made now is Syrian in its themes and concerns — but the industry’s full structure has not been rebuilt yet. That is entirely true.

The arts are among the most important signs that nations are still alive, because creative work represents the fulfilment of the highest human needs. When the arts die, it is not only art that dies — part of how a nation defines itself dies with it.

The Question Without an Answer

In the final scene of Big Dreams, a father sees his son Omar smiling and asks: “What are you laughing at?” Omar answers: “At this world.” Then, after a silence, he explains: “Because it’s all upside down. The one who walks straight falls flat on his face. The dreams were too big.”

Writer Reem Hanna wrote that scene seven years before the events of 2011, and twenty-two years before our present moment. Yet it reads as though it was written yesterday, as though whoever wrote it already knew how the story would end.

Can Syrian drama rise again to what it once was? The question is fair, and hope is fair. But what Syrian drama was in its golden era was not an accident, and it was not a gift from the sky. It was the product of historical, human, institutional, and professional conditions that formed slowly over decades. Some of those conditions have scattered. Some have died. Some have emigrated. Some have simply changed into something else.

What airs today under the name “Syrian drama” may be honest in its intentions and bold in its subjects — and that is worth saying. But it does not necessarily carry the layered identity that once made Syrian drama an industry without rival, and a voice unlike any other.

Some things, when they break, do not come back the way they were. And some dreams — however big — cannot be dreamed again.

Everything narrowed… narrowed until it was lost.

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References

1. Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts, Damascus, founded 1977.
2. Della Ratta, Donatella. Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria. Pluto Press, 2018. — Interview on the Whisper Strategy, Jadaliyya 2017
3. Salamandra, Christa. “Television and the Ethnographic Endeavor: The Case of Syrian Drama.” Arab Media & Society, 2005. — Full text — See also: Salamandra quoted in AP, 2026
4. Salamandra, Christa. “Past Continuous: The Chronopolitics of Representation in Syrian Television Drama.” Middle East Critique, 2019. — Full text
5. Salamandra, Christa. “The Dictator’s New Clothes: Syrian Drama’s Prescience.” Allegra Lab, 2025. — Full text
6. Kanaan, Wissam. “From the Collapse of ‘The Dam’ to ‘Exit to the Well’: How Syrian Drama Changed After Assad’s Fall.” Al Jazeera Arabic, February 2026. — Link
7. Joubin, Rebecca. The Politics of Love: Sexuality, Gender, and Marriage in Syrian Television Drama. Lexington Books, 2013.
8. Cooke, Miriam. Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official. Duke University Press, 2007.