Sundance 2017- City of Ghosts

City of Ghosts is one of the most horrifying and shocking documentaries you will ever see.  Director Matthew Heineman gives us an in-depth look at a group of journalists in Raqqa who use guerilla news reporting to show how ISIS is torturing and ruining Raqqa.

The extraordinary lengths these reporters go through is unbelievable.  The reporters, who run a protest/news group called Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, has a role and every person is in danger because of their role.  There is a technical team of people who shoot the videos and write the content about what is going on in Raqqa along with a spokesman who speaks at conferences  When most of the crew leaves Raqqa and go to a safer place in Germany, they keep men there to give them information.  There are underground reporters reporting everything and anything, while also giving the main crew information about who dies and what ISIS is doing next.  The crew hears about friends and family dying, while not being there to mourn them.  In very intimate scenes, we see the personal and physical affects of this war on these guys, including really intense panic attacks and hundred of cigarettes smoked.

The footage that Heineman shows is terrifying and brutal.  Videos of ISIS shooting and killing betrayers, heads on top of a fence as the bodies lay on the ground below them, and execution videos are all just some of the horrific images we are exposed to.  But the worst is the look at ISIS propaganda and the productions of their execution and how they manipulate children and a young age.  The scariest and chilling shot of the whole movie was of a child, maybe two years old, running into a room and decapitating a stuffed bear with a large knife in practice to become an ISIS member when they grow up.  It is an image that makes me sick to my stomach and one that I will never forget.

Heineman tells an incredible story here and does so with such craft and tact.  In showing these horrific images and showing use the affect it has on our reporters, we are scared for them at every turn, and have to applaud what these guys do.  But, the movie ends on a very bleak and scary note.  Stopping ISIS won’t solve anything.  This is a continuos cycle that will continue forever and one that will make you worried about the future of the world.

I don’t think I will get City of Ghosts out of my head for a long, long time, if at all.  This is a part of the world that I knew nothing about and am disgusted by what I know now.  It is an incredibly important movie, but one that is incredibly tough to sit through.  City of Ghosts lands on the list of great movies I never want to watch again.
MY RATING – 3.5/4

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