In Homs, a city of 1.4 million in central Syria, ruins of concrete and rebar are piled beside centuries-old buildings of black basalt stone. The landscape is dotted with partially damaged structures and lots reduced to rubble—scars from the Syrian civil war that ended in 2024 with the overthrow of the country’s former president, Bashar al-Assad.
As uprisings spread across the Middle East and North Africa beginning in 2011, Homs became an epicenter of protest against Assad’s oppressive rule. Thousands of protesters took to the streets in peaceful marches, later taking up arms to demand democracy and freedom of religious expression. Assad’s regime responded by killing at least 585 civilians in Homs during the first five months of the civil war alone, and ultimately laying siege to the city for three years. As the first major city in Syria where rebel groups organized armed resistance, many of the Homs’s buildings and homes were bombed to rubble. Even after the 2014 siege of Homs ended, residents remained displaced as widespread destruction prevented people from returning home. Reconstruction projects have been slow to take root and focus primarily on places of religious importance.
To many Syrians, Homs remains a symbol of struggle and resistance to this day. Amid the city’s ongoing construction projects and urban planning initiatives to rebuild Homs’s infrastructure, a local film group is hosting film screenings to bridge gaps in a community divided by nearly fourteen years of war.
Paul Hefel-James
New Clock Tower Square in Homs saw early demonstrations against the Assad regime in April 2011, when authorities violently suppressed popular protests.
The Homs Cinema Society was started in April 2025 by seven locals in their twenties who met at a cultural forum. Beyond sharing a love of film, the group was intent on seizing the opportunity after the fall of the Assad regime to screen movies that reflect elements of their experiences and create space to reckon with the long legacy of oppression and struggle in Syria. Since its founding, the organization has screened forty-five films, with an emphasis on work by Syrian filmmakers.
“We feel like it’s our duty to support the filmmakers from this place because we believe cinema can make a change,” says co-founder Majd al-Boukai. “I found it really important to let the people know more about their people and to see that kind of cinema.”
The first film the organization featured was Al-Raqib al-Khalid (The Immortal Sergeant) by Homs-born filmmaker Ziad Kalthoum. The documentary follows Kalthoum’s daily transition from military service as a sergeant in the Syrian army reserves to his work as an assistant director to filmmaker Mohammed Malas. Since then, the group has invited Syrian filmmakers to screen their work and speak with the audience; more recently, it has branched out into showing some international films. The guiding principle remains sharing films that are accessible to a broad audience and feel relevant to the questions people in Homs are facing about how to rebuild both their city and their communities.
Al-Boukai, twenty-seven, remembers the role his own social and familial ties played during the war, during which his parents sheltered relatives fleeing other parts of Homs.
“When we received our relatives in 2012, I was happy they were visiting us, but I didn’t know the reality,” al-Boukai says. “They were displaced. Their houses and their neighborhood were bombed.”
After hosting screenings at different locations during the first few months, the society found a more permanent home at the Jesuit Jean Francois Regis monastery, itself a hub of cultural activity in the city. During the war, Dutch priest Frans van der Lugt sheltered families in the monastery. In April 2014, after refusing to abandon his parishioners during the siege, he was assassinated by an unknown gunman, and is now buried on the monastery grounds. Current parish priest Antranik Kurukian now carries on van der Lugt’s legacy, promoting cultural events and educating young people in Homs.
Paul Hefel-James
Homs residents settle in for a film screening at the Jesuit Jean Francois Regis monastery.
The third-largest city in Syria, Homs is home to a diverse community of Sunni, Alawi, Christian, and Shi’a residents. While the cinema society draws strength from this diverse membership, coexistence in the city has not been without issues. During the five decades it was in power, the Assad regime exploited and fueled sectarian divisions in the country to maintain power, primarily between Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims (including Alawites), and Christians. Even after the regime was overthrown, rebuilding trust across these divides has been fraught, leaving the country on unstable social and political ground. During the war, extensive intelligence networks recruited people to inform on one another, sometimes even within families. Others used their connections to the regime apparatus for personal advancement, seizing land or settling scores at a high cost to their neighbors.
Homs in particular stands out as a current hotspot for reprisal killings and kidnappings, primarily of Alawi residents or those suspected of collaborating with the former Assad regime. Land and property disputes that have arisen as displaced Syrian people return to their city are adding pressure to a situation already in precarious balance.
“Culture can unite Christians, Muslims, and others. This is how we can find a common territory to live in,” Kurukian says. “People have some questions about what is next, what to do, how to live. It’s very normal to ask ‘Who is this person? How can I live with him?’ ”
Twenty-five-year-old Rahaf Rabahea, who lived in Homs with her family throughout the war, remembers the difficulties of that period. In addition to physical dangers, there was a lack of public spaces and absence of opportunities for social connection.
“I started to feel like solitude was more comfortable than being with people,” Rabahea says. It was during this time that she began watching more films—an interest that, in October 2025, led her to a workshop hosted by the Homs Cinema Society.
The organization aims to find common ground among attendees by hosting discussions after screenings, engaging people of all backgrounds and faiths in conversation about film, both in its aesthetics and in relation to their lived experiences. In June 2026, after regular attendees suggested somewhat lighter fare, the group showed The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (2022), an English animated film based on a children’s book. The monastery hall was filled with about seventy people, some in band T-shirts and wearing piercings, others wearing hijabs or walking with a cane. A little less than half of the audience remained afterward to participate in the conversation.
“It’s very important because they can [talk] about something in the movie and break this ice and get to know the other person, even if your identities are not similar,” says Rabahea, who now helps organize the screenings and moderate the weekly discussions. “For the last period of time, people were judging each other for their identities.”
Paul Hefel-James
Rahaf Rabahea grew up in Homs and now leads screenings and discussions for the Homs Cinema Society.
But those tensions seemed absent as audience members praised the film and reflected on their own lives.
“I feel that these animals offer a kind of love that is truly special,” one woman said before passing the microphone to the next speaker. “They possess an innate, unconditional affection; they simply give love without expecting anything in return—no ulterior motives or hidden agendas. That kind of pure, selfless love brings me immense comfort.”
“I wondered if I was someone who would adopt a new path, a fresh start,” another shared. “It is a path we try to take towards a home, where one finds peace. Because the life we lived before, we don’t want to dwell on it anymore.”
For some, a fresh start in Homs feels far away. Degrees of hope for a stable future in Syria vary widely amid the uncertainty about basic necessities and the limits of acceptable speech and expression. When asked about the realities of living as a young person in the city today, Rabahea says simply, “It’s messy.” Scant economic opportunities and concerns about shrinking spaces for free speech and expression are causing many Syrians to question the longevity of the new society for which they fought. The sudden arrest and detention of British Syrian activist Hassan Akkad in Damascus in late June, for “alleged criticism of public figures,” prompted dismay among those who saw it as a curb on free speech. Authorities released Akkad after one of the public figures in question dropped a lawsuit he filed against him.
Many young people in Homs move to the Syrian capital city of Damascus or, when possible, abroad in search of better opportunities for education or employment. Some of the Homs Cinema Society’s members have themselves left to find work in the capital to sustain themselves and the group’s activities.
A 2022 World Bank report estimated that more than 65,000 housing units, or 35 percent of the pre-war housing stock, in Homs were destroyed during the war. The Jesuit monastery hosting the film screenings was damaged and has since benefited from reconstruction projects, though these initiatives remain limited. Residential areas in particular have seen little in the way of rebuilding.
“People want to live freely and have a good economy, to marry, to have children, to travel, visit new places, to live in security,” Kurukian says. “I can encourage them, but faith alone is not enough. We need something more to stay here.”
For now, the young people leading the Homs Cinema Society are backing themselves to maintain a strong community and lay the groundwork for a future in the city.
“I’m a bit optimistic because in the end, the people have no other choice than to understand what’s going on, survive, and do their best to ask for their rights,” al-Boukai says. “I hope it will be less harsh and less violent in the future because we already had too much.”