Jackie Chan’s Film Production Under Fire for Shooting in War-Torn Syria

A Chinese film production backed by action star Jackie Chan has been slammed for shooting at a Syrian town destroyed in the civil war.

The filming of Home Operation began last week at the ruins of Hajar al-Aswad, a former ISIS holdout in a Damascus suburb. The action flick is aimed to glorify China’s growing role in international affairs, but some Syrian filmmakers have lambasted the production for profiteering from other people’s suffering and called it unethical.

By using the wreckage as a backdrop for their own story, the filmmakers are “dancing over the corpses of people that have been killed,” the Emmy Award-winning Syrian director Feras Fayyad told VICE World News. “It is a disgraceful ethical transgression.”

Set in the fictional country of Poman, the film is based on the Chinese military’s efforts to evacuate hundreds of Chinese and foreign nationals from Yemen in 2015 during intense fighting between government troops and rebels. Among those evacuated were Pakistanis, Ethiopians, Italians, and Germans, and the intervention was hailed by Chinese commentators as a showcase of an increasingly powerful and benevolent China.

As Yemen is considered too dangerous for the shoot, some scenes were filmed instead in Syria, which director Rawad Shahin, who is part of the Syrian crew, described as “low-cost studios.”

“It is a bloody trade,” said Ali Al Ibrahim, another Syrian documentary filmmaker, who escaped the country in 2015 and founded the Syrian Investigative Reporting for Accountability Journalism Network. “China is using the ruins of people’s homes as a place to make money and drama.”

“The same time the Assad regime offered the city of Al-Hajar Al-Aswad for rent in films, the displaced people of the stricken city are living in tents in northwest Syria, hoping to return to what is left of their homes one day,” Ibrahim said. “What will Jackie Chan tell them?”

Home Operation looks set to join a growing catalog of nationalistic films that have displaced foreign productions in recent years to dominate the Chinese box office. The Battle at Lake Changjin, a 2021 blockbuster depicting Chinese troops’ valiant and successful pushback against U.S. forces in the Korean war, smashed records to become the country’s highest-grossing film ever at a time of worsening U.S.-China ties.

Chan, the executive producer of the film, is not expected to visit Hajar al-Aswad or Syria, but photos showed Chinese director Yinxi Song and Chinese Ambassador to Syria Feng Biao at the devastated town last Thursday, when they celebrated the launch of the shoot next to a red banner on a tank that says “Peace & Love.”

Hajar al-Aswad, meaning Black Stone, was a stronghold for opposition fighters during the civil war and later for the ISIS group. The neighborhood was largely deserted after the Syrian military launched an air and ground assault in 2018 to expel extremist fighters.

Director Rawad Shahin said filming in Hajar al-Aswad was a matter of cost. “Building studios similar to these areas is very expensive, so these areas are considered as low-cost studios,” Shahin told AFP.

Fayyad, the Syrian filmmaker, took issue with the choice of filming location. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his documentary, Last Men in Aleppo, which followed White Helmet volunteers as they rescued survivors of military strikes during the civil war. Twice arrested and tortured by the Bashar al-Assad regime, the 37-year-old is among 6.8 million Syrians who fled the country since 2011. 

“Filmmaking is first and foremost based on absolute sensitivity and respect towards other cultures. Do the producers or filmmakers know how many people are buried under the rubble there?” Fayyad said. 

The Chinese director Yinxi Song did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The Syrian civil war has killed more than 300,000 civilians since it began in 2011, stemming from an uprising against dictator Assad’s regime. China has backed the Syrian government despite its war atrocities, including the use of chemical weapons. President Xi Jinping of China in May congratulated Assad on his reelection, in a vote criticized by Western democracies as illegitimate.

Journalists and documentarians have filmed in the country, sometimes risking reprisal or worse from the Syrian authorities.

But Home Operation appears to have what many critics or independent filmmakers lack—the Assad government’s blessing—raising further ethical and political questions.

Iranian director Ibrahim Hatami, for example, stirred controversy in 2019 for liaising with Iran-backed Hezbollah officials to shoot All This Victory in parts of Syria under their control and portraying the ruins as destruction caused by Israel in Lebanon.

Elsewhere, in 2020, Disney’s live-action remake of Mulan was also criticized for being partly filmed in Xinjiang, where Chinese authorities have targeted Uyghur and other Muslim minorities for mass detention. The show’s end credits thanked the Xinjiang authorities, including a police bureau that has been sanctioned by the U.S. government.

British film critic Kaleem Aftab said there was “no surprise” China wanted to film in Syria given its support for the Assad regime, but he said he would reserve his judgment until the movie comes out. 

“It’s tricky terrain to say definitively if a filming location is ethically wrong, especially given the complexity of geopolitics,” he said. “It will be more revealing about the nature of the film and the motives of the shoot when we see the film.”

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