A Flood in Baath Country

This film essay starts with a confession: director Omar Amiralay regrets his naive enthusiasm about the construction of the Tabqa Dam in the Euphrates valley—the subject of his 1970 documentary Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam. In that film, he praised the Syrian government for its modernizing drive, the consequences of which he didn't realize until a couple years later—the building of this dam radically changed the Syrian landscape. He then made Everyday Life in a Syrian Village (1974), showing how the inhabitants of a village along the Euphrates were affected by the dam and how the government abandoned them. With A Flood in Baath Country, Amiralay closes his trilogy on the Baath Party and its prestige project. Almost three decades later, he returns to the valley that is now home to Lake Assad. In the village of Al Mashi, he finds the perfect microcosm of the Baath Party regime, which promised socialism but instead introduced a strict autocracy in which old tribal structures were preserved.