Berlinale 2026: The Other Side of the Sun (dir. Tawfik Sabouni) | Review

The Other Side of the Sun is the directorial debut of Syrian filmmaker Tawfik Sabouni, premiering in this year’s Berlinale 2026 Panorama Documentary category. The screenplay, written by Sabouni and collaborator Laurine Estrade, takes us on a journey through a truly harrowing 92 minutes, in which the director is joined by a group of men in a trip to the infamous Sednaya Prison in Damascus. The one thing these men have in common: each of them was a prisoner there during the Assad regime. This is one of the most devastating documentaries I’ve ever seen — and one of the most important watches of this year’s Berlinale selection.

Sednaya was a military prison and death camp known as “the other side of the sun” or “behind the sun” due to its total isolation from the rest of the world – and the total lack of humanity demonstrated by those in charge. The Assad regime ran Sednaya from 1986 until 2011 for civil detainees and political prisoners, and when the Syrian Civil War began in 2011, used it as a place to detain, torture and kill anti-government rebels. Sednaya was a site of severe human rights violations and war crimes including rape, torture and mass executions, which continued until 8th December 2024 – a day also known as ‘The Fall of Damascus’. 

Director Tawfik Sabouni was one of the inmates who survived long enough to see the closure of the prison, and soon after his release set about making The Other Side of the Sun, in an awe-inspiring effort to document, to remember and to act as a witness to the atrocities suffered. He takes himself, his camera, and four fellow survivors – Mahmoud Alqadah, Abdelkafi Alhaj, Mohammad Hamki, Abdelhamid Jadoue – back to reconstruct, share, and re-enact their memories of Sednaya. 

These men did not know each other whilst inside, and so this documentary also serves as a means for the survivors to arrange together the missing puzzle pieces of their experiences; the structure of the buildings, the knowledge of the guards, the torture and the humiliation. 

There is no sensationalism in The Other Side of the Sun, no archival montage, not a single unnecessary word. The men re-enact the crouched walks, the averted gazes, the way they huddled together for humanity, warmth and comfort in the years they spent in the isolated underground cells. This film is a true testament to the embodiment of storytelling. Sabouni seems to understand this as a project not only about memory, but also as a creative exploration of the potentials and limits of artistic representation of history and trauma.

The prison itself is empty. No guards, no soldiers, no regime — only walls, corridors, and the memories of thousands of people who never got the chance to leave. Watching these men hesitate at certain thresholds, breakdown in certain doorways, or reach out to steady one another is almost unbearable. The film makes visible the very architecture of atrocity. 

In a global moment where news headlines are once again turned towards Syria, this film brings political newsfeeds into a devastatingly human perspective; the mothers who no longer recognised their emaciated sons, the shock of seeing the sky after years in confinement, the miracle of watching birds fly after total isolation in a prison cell. The film raises questions of who did not survive and who is still searching; the names lost in documents now piled high in the abandoned prison offices. 

Berlinale, of all the major film festivals, has strived to understand cinema as a political space – despite Wim Wenders’s recent comments to the contrary – and The Other Side of the Sun is a perfect, devastating example of that mission. This is not an easy watch, and it definitely shouldn’t be. But it is a film that will stay with me for a very long time — and one I highly recommend everybody to go and see. 

Our team is on the ground at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, running from February 12th to 22nd, 2026.