Official Oscar® Entry from Syria: ‘Little Gandhi’ in Best Foreign Language Film Category
Syria’s first ever submission in the Motion Picture Academy’s Foreign Language category, “Little Gandhi”, is one of a handful of documentaries submitted for Best Foreign Language Film nomination this year.
It comes to the Academy in a most unusual way. It was selected not by the country which is how submissions are always made, but by a committee of artists in exile. If any of these people had actually been in Syria they would likely have been imprisoned, tortured and executed, for this was the fate of Ghiyath Matar, the Syrian activist who became known for giving flowers and roses to army soldiers in his home town of Daraya, leader of the once peaceful Syrian revolution and the Little Gandhi of the title. It premiered at the ongoing Asian World Film Festival.
I have yet to see the documentary submission for Academy Award® nomination entitled Syria Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of Isis, Oscar® nominee Sebastian Junger and Emmy winner Nick Quested’s documentary presented by National Geographic Documentary Films chronicling Syria’s descent into the unbridled chaos that allowed the rise of the Islamic State, better known as ISIS. While it opened theatrically in New York and Los Angeles on May 19 to critical acclaim and began airing globally on National Geographic on June 11, Little Gandhi stands in stark contrast as it was made on a microbudget, sometimes directed via Skype because of the danger of shooting in Syria and suffering from lack of publicity usually supplied by the submitting nation, although it was invited to show in the U.S. Congress and staged a 2,000 person commemoration ceremony at Lincoln Memorial. Still, to promote it, producer-writer-director Sam Kadi is raising private equity.
Having seen this labor of love and learned about the young activist who was the first to resist and who led the first mass peaceful demonstration against the Syrian tyrant Assad, I feel my own life has taken a more positive and substantive shape in that the film helped crystalize my thoughts.
The film also reminds us of the origins of The Arab Spring and how it coincided with Syria’s specific condition in this paroxysm of time as it demonstrates how peaceful overtures, meeting rifles with roses, can triumph over the rule of power wielded by tyrants and their weapon-bearing soldiers.
Little Gandhi commemorates a great and unsung hero of non-violent resistance. He becomes iconic as he starts the peace initiative with roses and bottles of water. This film makes you believe that in spite of all the wars we are witnessing today, there is the possibility of peace if the minds of people would only embrace and live it.
It all started in 2003 when young high school activists in the small city of Daraya just outside of Damascus were protesting things like bribery and corruption and studying pacifist philosophies and acts of Mahatma Ghandhi, Martin Luther King, non-violent protests in the United States in the 60s and The White Rose, the non-violent, intellectual resistance group in Nazi Germany led by a group of students and a professor at the University of Munich. At that time, many of them were imprisoned for three years for their activism.
When The Arab Spring began in Tunisia in 2010 they were already experienced. A popular body builder in the high school, Ghiyath Matar, took his place among them and energized the other activists in their peaceful protests. Though the Syrian government tortured and killed him and his partner, and though those who could fled similar fates, the ideas they have activated are very much still alive and seeing this movie helps to propagate their ideas. That is why this movie should be widely seen.
Ghiyath Matar died on September 10, 2011 and his funeral was attended by ambassadors of six countries including Germany, Japan, Denmark, France’s Ambassador Chevalier and the United States’ Ambassador Robert Ford. Both Ambassadors Ford and Chevalier say on film they did not inform their governments because had they asked permission, they knew their governments would have told them not to go. Their presence allowed the funeral to be held in public (the Syrian government advised the family not to make it public) and after the ambassadors left, the government suppressed the mourners. Matar was 25 years old. A couple of months later, his wife gave birth to a child who she named after his father, Ghiath Matar.
This documentary brings his memory and his ideas alive for all who see the film and puts into proper perspective the words and deeds of Gandhi, Martin Luther King and The White Rose Movement. (An interesting side note about The White Rose: when its leaders Hans and Sophie Scholl were interrogated by the Gestapo, they alluded to the possibility that the name White Rose might have been taken from a German novel Die Weiße Rose (The White Rose), published in Berlin in 1929 and written by B. Traven, the German author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Hans Scholl and Alex Schmorell had read this novel. They also wrote that the symbol of the white rose was intended to represent purity and innocence in the face of evil.)
All I have learned about Gandhi; all that I identified with when I read and saw The Diary of Anne Frank as a young girl, all that I resounded with in seeing Michael Verhoeven’s movie The White Rose, and by repeatedly bicycling past the theater where the stage play The White Rose continually runs in my Schoenberg neighborhood in Berlin; and all that I witnessed in those heady university days, witnessing and taking part in the civil rights struggles, beginning with freedom riders, MLK, to Stokely Carmichael and Medgar Evans, then to Eldridge Cleaver and The Black Panthers, seeing how these positive loving days of protest were suppressed and went underground like sad corpses laid to an uneasy rest: these give me my perspective.
Today, seeing how the long dormant forces of misogyny, racism, anti-semitism — and that includes Jews and Arabs — have risen like flesh eating zombies, seeing Gandhi’s very image being wiped out by the Myanmar massacres of genocide by Hindus against Muslims, seeing Little Ghandhi has awakened my simmering thoughts of peace, justice and equality, and I feel renewed to uphold a vigorous form of pacifism. The words of Einstein echo in my mind, “I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.” This is what Ghiyath Matar also believed. He did not believe Syrian soldiers would kill Syrian citizens and so he met them with water and roses.
This is Sam Kadi’s first documentary. His previous film, starring Cary Elwes, The Citizen was about immigrants. He was born in Aleppo, Syria and has lived in U.S. for eighteen years. Sam decided to make Little Gandhi to rearrange the Syrian file which is so confusing. There are lots of misconceptions and no one talks about the individuals. What happened? Who are the Syrians? Why did they decide after 45 years to rise up? They did it for future generations.
The first screening of this film was in Istanbul where the activists fled along with the other refugees. He then showed it to the U.S. Congress, the Canadian Parliament where he sat with Prime Minster Trudeau, and then Amnesty International in London became big supporters. Sam is currently in Los Angeles for the screening of his film at the third annual Asian World Film Festival, being held at the Arclight in Culver City, October 25 to November 2. He is actively seeking more ways to promote this film, placing 1,000 bottles of water with attached roses at the steps of Lincoln Memorial and in Paris at the Eiffel Tower, and raising money on through private investment. Contact samerkadi [AT] yahoo.com for more information.
The Golden Globes premiere of Little Gandhi took place at the Asian World Film Festival at the Arclight Theater in Culver City, California, November 2017. It was picked up there for international sales by Fantastic Films who began sales at AFM immediately after the Festival premiere.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LGandhiFilm/
“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our ways of thinking, and thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophes.”
“I don’t know what will be used in the next world war, but the 4th will be fought with stones.”
— Albert Einstein (1879–1955)
In 1930 Einstein signed a manifesto for world disarmament sponsored by the Womans International League for Peace and Freedom. In December of the same year, he made his famous statement in New York that if two percent of those called for military service were to refuse to fight, governments would become powerless, since they could not imprison that many people. He also argued strongly against compulsory military service and urged that conscientious objectors should be protected by the international community. He argued that peace, freedom of individuals, and security of societies could only be achieved through disarmament, the alternative being “slavery of the individual and annihilation of civilization”.
Here are a few more things that Einstein said about peace:
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that we used when we created them.”
“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”
“Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.”
“The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get different results.”
“Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.”
“Past thinking and methods did not prevent world wars. Future thinking must prevent war.”
“You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.”
“Never do anything against conscience, even if the state demands it.”
“Without ethical culture, there is no salvation for humanity.”
“Taken as a whole, I would believe that Gandhi’s views were the most enlightened of all political men of our time.”
Albert Einstein, great physicist and lifelong pacifist, we need your voice today! And Ghiyath Matar brought it to the Middle East. Long may his memory live.
