The Cave and For Sama may also strike a nerve with US audiences because they flatter a penitential strain among many American liberals: the belief that what happened in Syria is a stain on the Western conscience. “I cannot believe the world allowed this to happen,” the filmmaker Waad al-Kateab tells the camera. It is perfectly natural for Syrians, who were desperate for help from any side, to talk like this. But the way Americans heard it often amounted to a kind of narcissism, a belief that whatever was happening out there was a result of our own failure to intervene decisively. Perhaps America could have played a better role. It seems equally possible that the world—America included—was far too involved in what happened in Syria, and that foreign guns and money have only prolonged the country’s suffering.
Source : And the Oscar Goes to… A Simplified Story of Syria’s Civil War
