Filming Home Operation, co-produced by the United Arab Emirates and Chinese action and martial arts star Jackie Chan, began on July 14. It is inspired by China’s 2015 evacuation of hundreds of Chinese and foreign citizens from war-torn Yemen aboard Chinese navy ships.
The director of the feature film, Yinxi Song, regularly posts images and videos of the shooting on social networks, including sequences shot in Damascus.
The choice of location for the filming outraged some Syrians, explains the Lebanese site Al-Modon, hostile to the power of President Bashar Al-Assad.
“This shooting angered Syrians on social media because Chinese society [de production] chose an area destroyed by the Syrian regime to film their scenes, considering it ‘a parody of the blood of the Syrians’.”
“What will Jackie Chan tell them?”
In fact, part of the film takes place “between the destroyed houses and the rubble” in the district of Hajar Al-Aswad, in the south of Damascus, ravaged in 2018 by a Syrian army operation. “The place has been an area of siege and starvation organized by regime forces, and a target of incessant raids and shelling,” remember Al-Modon.
“While the Assad regime offers Hajar Al-Aswad for rental and filming, the displaced from the stricken neighborhood are living in tents in northwestern Syria, hoping to one day return to this what remains of their homes. What will Jackie Chan tell them? tweete a Syrian photographer.
Omar Alshogre, a Syrian refugee living in Sweden and a survivor of Syria’s infamous Saidnaya prison, says “disappointed” by Jackie Chan.
As written Al-Modon, “the Syrian regime has opened the doors of Damascus to war cinema”. Since the beginning of the conflict, in 2011, Syria has indeed already attracted several foreign productions, in particular from Russia and Iran, two allied countries of Bashar El-Assad.
This conflict has claimed at least 500,000 lives and displaced millions of people, inside the country and abroad.