A million bits of video from a thousand different sources appear on screen, smuggled out of Syria as testament to its implosion. Peaceful demonstrators are shot dead in the street, young men are tortured and humiliated, civilians flee destroyed cities carrying the bodies of their children. Explaining, framing, and recoiling from these images, Syrian filmmaker Ossama Mohammed offers a fragmented essay in voice-over, questioning the possibility and significance of cinema in a world with such horror. Living as a frustrated exile in Paris, he eventually begins a lengthy Facebook correspondence with a Kurdish woman named Wiam Simav Bedirxan, still inside Syria in the besieged city of Homs. Their extraordinary conversation provides a moving backdrop to scenes shot by Simav herself of life in the rubble of Syria’s protracted civil war. (DS)