‘The conscience of this country’: How filmmakers are documenting resistance in the age of censorship

Authoritarian regimes often single out artists for repression, wary of criticism and independent voices.

For this arts writer and media maker, it’s all achingly close to home: Trump has orchestrated his election as chair of the Kennedy Center. There are U.S. executive orders targeting the Smithsonian’s curation and mandating Classicism for federal public buildings.

It has come as no surprise, then, that themes of artistic oppression, risk, and folly — now such a global affair — loomed large at this year’s film festivals that I’ve attended: Documentary Fortnight at MoMA, First Look 2025, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), and Slamdance. The documentaries covering this terrain are critical, instructive primers on how to address mounting threats.

Among the most startling: Chronicles of the Absurd, a film by Cuban filmmaker Miguel Coyula that culls from surreptitiously recorded audio during interrogations by the security service or police. The results are revealing. An on-screen quote opens the film: “Had Kafka been Cuban, he’d have been a non-fiction writer.” It’s from Virgilio Piñera (1912–1979), the gay playwright, poet, short story writer, essayist, and translator who was censored by the regime.

This is a film essentially about words: “It’s just the recordings of the events — the language, which is really what the film is about,” Coyula told me at IDFA. He makes the handicap of no imagery into an asset, visualizing the hidden cell phone audio recordings with words that grow onscreen as tempers flare. These words are enhanced with graphics and colors, and with photos of the artists in a style inspired by late 1980s–early ’90s role-playing video game grids with multiple characters. We don’t know what the officials conducting the interrogations look like, so Coyula uses figures from Expressionist painter Antonia Eiriz’s (1929–1995) Edvard Munch/Francisco Goya–like grotesques to emphasize their absurd, surreal behavior.

Eiriz was a prominent, heralded artist after Cuba’s 1959 Revolution but later labelled a dissident, Coyula explained. She stopped painting — she didn’t want to damage the Revolution — until she immigrated to Miami in 1993, just two years before her death.  

“I’m working specifically with something that is apparently intrinsically anti-cinematic, which is just still pictures and sound,” Coyula said. “So I had to come up with a rhythm that will be able to hold the narration of a feature-length [film].” He continued: “I couldn’t find … photographs of the agents because they were faceless, and even when they give their names in the audio, they’re not their real names, …so I thought of Antonio’s paintings to represent them as avatars, and animate them.”

A central contretemps in the film is with up-and-coming actress Lynn Cruz, Coyula’s partner who was targeted because of her column for the independent Havana Times. When she showed up for an acting job for which she had been cast, Cruz was told she was no longer in the government-run Actuar union. (Membership is mandatory for any working artist in Cuba.) As she had not been notified in advance or had a hearing as required, Cruz decided to record all subsequent interactions.

Also featured are the recordings of a handful of other artists who’ve had run-ins with the regime (Coyula included). Among them: Javier Caso, a photographer now living in the U.S. (and the brother of actress Ana de Armas), whose heart beats audibly on the cell phone strapped to his chest as he is questioned on photographing Cruz at an “independent” film shoot.

The jury of IDFA, the largest documentary film festival in the world, named Chronicles its best film of 2024 “for its radical form that matches and embodies the radical spirit of artists refusing to be silenced.”

Another film dealing with suppression, albeit from a different angle, is Seen/Unseen: An Anthology of (Auto) Censorship. It takes place in Turkey under the strongman President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The documentary comprises six videos from the filmmaker-group project Altyazı Fasikül: Free Cinema exploring self-censorship based on the 2013 protests sparked by the violent eviction of a sit-in protesting urban development plans that started in Istanbul and spread throughout the country. The film puts forth unflinching provocations like: “[Filmmaker] Ayse Çetinbas once said documentary filmmakers are the conscience of this country. In the last decade, which stories has our conscience struggled to give voice to? Which stories have we been deprived of? What do we lack?”

And: “Can we find courage in images? In sounds?” What, in other words, are the limits of expression in the dynamics between authoritarian rule and curbing your own output? These questions are posed through a range of formats: video essays (unmade films or “missing documentaries”), reenactments (prisoners writing “what the pen writes, the axe cannot erase” on the wall in shoe polish), and interviews (with filmmakers, lawyers). Also on display: Obfuscating techniques such as face-blurring or slow shutter speeds to fuzz the images. “Are our decisions based on fear,” the creators ask, “or is it our political stance? How do we distinguish?”

A sterile, vacant new Syrian town takes center stage in The Orchards/Al Basasteen. Created in 2015 as the the now-deposed Bashar al-Assad regime’s flagship reconstruction project, Marota City was advertised as “a dream city, a smart city,” and erected in Basateen al-Razi, a suburb outside Damascus that was once a rebel stronghold. Cronies of the president were to profit; foreign investment was sought. We see empty, palm tree–lined boulevards with new glass and steel skyscrapers, one after another. Yellow tape maps out spaces that used to be there, a neighborhood of small, hand-made homes. After protests, police would set fire to the houses and raze orchards. “The best organized city in the Middle East” is now an abandoned wasteland.

A heartbreaking short about the Middle East is The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing, made using archival footage from the 1930s and ’40s by a Scottish missionary who shot very early 16mm color film of the landscapes and flora he found in British-protectorate Palestine. Filmmaker Theo Panagopoulos discovered this footage in a local library in Glasgow and wanted to show these past images contrasted with today’s horrors taking place in Gaza. (The short won the 2024 IDFA award for best short documentary.) The original 45 minutes of archival footage featured mostly white people, with Palestinians seen in only two minutes of footage, a telling detail from the colonial past that resonates today. It is “a time of grief as well, where you see something so beautiful, but also you’re grieving the present,” Panagopoulos said in a Directors Notes interview. “There is that tension of that beauty and that violence that is constantly within the same frame.” 

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Films in this curation:

• Chronicles of the Absurd. Directed by Miguel Coyula. IDFA and First Look 2025.
• Seen/Unseen: An Anthology of (Auto) Censorship. Directed by Fırat Yücel, Erhan Örs, Hakan Bozyurt, Can Memiş, Sibil Çekmen, Serra Akcan, Nadir Sönmez, belit sağ. Documentary Fortnight at MoMA.
• The Orchards/Al Basasteen. Directed by Antoine Chapon. Documentary Fortnight at MoMA.
• The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing. Directed by Theo Panagopoulos. Slamdance.

If you enjoyed this, be sure to revisit Susan Morris reviews documentary films about women in music.