Two Syrian Filmmakers Turned the Camera on Their Own Wait for Asylum

Two filmmakers who spent years running toward airstrikes in Aleppo now wake to a recorded voice telling them to remain calm and evacuate the building. The fire alarm in their London hotel for asylum seekers goes off so often that they joke about it. If it were real, one of them says, the authorities would be happy to have fewer asylum seekers. Their film is about the part of documentary work most people never see: the long stretch after the footage is shot, when the people who held the cameras have nothing left to do but wait.

The New Yorker has released "Allies in Exile," a 40-minute documentary by Hasan Kattan and Fadi al-Halabi, as the first of five short films it's putting out weekly from the Displacement Film Fund, which Cate Blanchett spearheaded and the International Film Festival Rotterdam's Hubert Bals Fund manages. The film premiered at Rotterdam in January. Kattan and al-Halabi have been friends for 15 years, since they met at the Aleppo Media Center, a collective of young activists and reporters who taught themselves to film the war so the outside world could see it. In early 2024, they came to London for the premiere of their documentary on the 2023 earthquake, then learned they were barred from returning to Turkey, where they had been rebuilding their lives. Claiming asylum was the only alternative to being sent back to Syria to face prison or death.

Title cards count the days: 107 in London by May 2024, 203 by August. Kattan's wife, Rama, and their children, Thaer and Kamilya, are still in Turkey, and one of the kids sends a video message asking when they can come to him. He admits he has lied to them to keep their hope alive, and he worries that every call leads them to picture a dream life that reality won't match. The waiting has its own cruelty. If papers came within three months, one of them says, he could work and pay his taxes like anyone else, but he knows people who have been in the system for a year, and he fears being forgotten in it.

The archive footage explains why the waiting cuts so deep. Describing years of covering attack after attack, Kattan says the camera started to detach them from feeling, and that they had become "professionals at documenting death." The clips beside that line show barrel bombs landing on buildings full of people and the chaos of the evacuation when Aleppo fell to Assad and Russian forces after months under siege. All Kattan carried out of the city was their footage, which he calls "the memory of a city that must never be forgotten." Later, in Idlib, al-Halabi and his brother, Yaman, went to film the aftermath of a chemical attack and were caught in a second strike, one Kattan says was meant to erase any survivors and silence the witnesses. They survived it.

Much of the world's visual record of the Syrian war came from locals like these two, people who picked up cameras because foreign crews could rarely get in or stay long. "Last Men in Aleppo," made in collaboration with the Aleppo Media Center and shot in part by al-Halabi, won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for documentary at Sundance in 2017 and later earned an Oscar nomination. Waad Al-Kateab, whose "For Sama" won the BAFTA for best documentary in 2020, went on to direct "Death Without Mercy," an earthquake documentary that Kattan produced and al-Halabi shot. The numbness Kattan describes is familiar to anyone who works around trauma, and the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia publishes free guidance for journalists and filmmakers on how that exposure affects the people behind the lens. Trauma reactions don't always show up right away. If you photograph accidents, fires, or protests, the quiet afterward is often when it catches up, and an asylum hotel with nothing to do but wait is exactly that kind of quiet.

Humor keeps the film from collapsing under its own weight. The two tease each other over a towel one of them wiped his feet on, joke their way through a haircut in the hotel bathroom, and, when a helicopter passes over London, one assures the other that they only drop flowers here. Kattan says that kind of humor was how they survived the madness in Idlib, too. The asylum process is less funny. Al-Halabi gets his Home Office interview first, rates his morale "at zero" on the way in, and says he'll ask them to interview Kattan before him, since Kattan's family is suffering in Turkey. Afterward, he describes being asked whether the regime had given him an arrest warrant, and he came away convinced the officials know nothing about Syria. Months later, he's told he needs another interview.

The hardest moment in their story, by Kattan's account, came with the 7.8-magnitude earthquake. Al-Halabi's entire family, including his parents and Yaman, was trapped beneath the rubble, and after days of waiting, no one survived. Kattan filmed those days and still carries guilt over pointing a camera at his best friend during the darkest stretch of his life. Telling that story became al-Halabi's way to honor his family.

In November 2024, 293 days in, Kattan gets refugee status, calls his daughter with the news, and applies for family reunion. He leaves al-Halabi behind in a hotel he describes as 700 people with 700 stories, all of them files waiting to be processed. Weeks later, the Assad regime falls. Al-Halabi remembers Yaman carrying a banner that read, "When you celebrate in victory, remember me," and says that if Assad had stepped down at the start, his family would never have left Aleppo, and he wouldn't have lost them. Still waiting on his own case, he says he'll regret going back and regret staying, then heads back to Syria.

Kattan's family arriving at the airport comes near the end of the video, and after 40 minutes in that hotel with him, it's a relief to watch.