One of the entries in the recent American Film Institute documentary film festival was Salam Neighbor, made by two young American filmmakers who were embedded for a month at the enormous Zaatari refugee camp for Syrians in Jordan. Chris Temple and Zach Ingrasci were allowed to live in a UN tent in January and February of this year. Their aim, they said at a special presentation of the movie in Washington, was to shed light on an aspect of the current Middle East turmoil generally given short shrift by the Western media. In other words, news reports concentrate on the fighting and the shifting balance of territorial control, but the fate of refugees is generally relegated to a footnote in the story.
Salam Neighbor is a kind of 60-minute selfie on how daily life in a gated and wire-enclosed environment of more than 100,000 displaced Syrians is seen by two young Americans with a camera, but by their own admission with no prior knowledge of the Middle East and its enormous complexities. That lack of background leads to shortcomings in the documentary. Overall, the narrative is moving and even oddly cheerful—in sharp contrast to other media descriptions of life in this and other camps, and indeed the accepted reality of what António Guterres, the UN high commissioner for refugees, recently called “the biggest humanitarian emergency of our area.”
With the number of refugees now topping three million, Guterres complained recently that many nations have failed to honor their commitment to help. If Salam Neighbor, whose makers needed prior approval from the UN Refugee Agency and a handful of other agencies active on the ground to live in the camp, was intended to convey a sense of urgency, it doesn’t quite succeed.
There are children playing soccer, attending the camp school, and inventing games, and there are women cheerfully enjoying a new sense of freedom from the traditional seclusion of their lives at home. The women are shown attending courses offered by the UN to develop their skills, taking dancing lessons, and even starting small businesses. There is a sense of permanence about the camp, and not a feeling of living on borrowed time.
The feel-good atmosphere of Salam Neighbor went down well with the screening’s invited audience of ambassadors, State Department, USAID, and Homeland Security types. And why not? Increasing the number of Syrian refugees admitted to the US from the current trickle seems less urgent when they seem to be having such a perfectly lovely time at Camp Zaatari. One senior woman from the State Department said in a post-screening conference that a “few thousand” more Syrians were “in the pipeline” but nobody asked her for specifics.
The film’s Arab dialogue sometimes contains an angry subtext which is not reflected in the English subtitles, but there is little evidence of the camp’s darker side. For example, the two young filmmakers learn on arrival that the Jordanian authorities who police the camp would not allow them to spend nights in the camp because they could be targeted by criminals.
The filmmakers explain in the documentary that Jordanians are able to control the camp during the day, but are clearly not prepared to be responsible for anything that might happen to the young Americans there at night. So, every evening, the two young filmmakers departed to spend the night in a nearby town, returning to the camp at six in the morning.
But in the film, the security aspect in the camp is never developed. Other media reports on the camp, however, have talked of clashes between the police and refugees, of organized gangs exploiting the refugees, of drug use and wholesale smuggling.
Also not addressed in the film is any insurgent presence, whereas other accounts say the Syrian camps seethe with political activity. A mother is said in passing to have lost insurgent sons, one killed by ISIS. And in one fleeting scene, refugees are seen demonstrating in favor of the anti-regime insurgents. But other reports talk of tension between different rebel factions, and more recently of ISIS appearing on the scene.
There’s no sign of a Syrian hierarchy in the camp either. Rather, the impression is that Zaatari is run by a nice, portly UN official who has time for long chats with the two filmmakers, and who presumably has the undying loyalty of thousands of grateful Syrian souls whom the UN feeds and nurtures.