Mohammad Ali Atassi

Born in Syria, Mohammad Ali Atassi is a journalist, human rights activist, and award-winning documentary filmmaker. He graduated in Civil Engineering from the University of Damascus in 1992 and completed a postgraduate degree in History at the Sorbonne in 1996. At the turn of the century, he began writing on political and cultural issues for Arab and international newspapers, focusing particularly on dissidents and human rights violations in his country, a mission that soon extended into documentary filmmaking. Among his works are Waiting for Abu Zayd (2010), a portrait of Egyptian intellectual Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, a pioneer of reformist ideas about Islam; Our Terrible Country (2014), centered on the Syrian revolution and the journey of writer Yassin al-Haj Saleh into exile; and Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege (2021), about the siege of the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus, documenting the daily resistance of a community surrounded by war. He comes to LEFFEST for a conversation with historian Farouk Mardam-Bey, his compatriot, following the screening of Our Terrible Country.