About

Faqat Tis3een Thaniyeh (translated: 90 Seconds) is an animated recreation of footage found amongst countless hours of video from the Syrian civil war. Frame by frame the footage was recreated in watercolor. Participants from all over the world were asked to reenact the audio, translate, and provide contextual information. The work is a performance and examination of a video sourced by chance. A video that later turned out to be documentation of a significant bombing by the Al-Nasra brigade in Syria.



The Syria Civil War has, by now, affected every splinter of the country's population: for the past three years, armed conflict between the military/armed supporters of the Ba'ath government (ruled authoritatively by President Bashar al-Assad) and the opposing forces of the Free Syrian Army (now with militant variants causing internal disruption even within their own Arab allied forces) has claimed over 130,000 lives and displaced over 5 million citizens. Analyzing the nature of both live and recorded media coverage throughout the conflict has been deemed nearly impossible due to the complex web of betrayals and allegiances running through each camp. A live feed of a bombing may be staged simply as a rallying call, leaked photos of confiscated chemical weapons possess religious texts, or external forces might skew the timeline and outcome of a particular skirmish. Sifting through the endless tide of visual media, the film offers a compelling dialogue on how the international viewing audience processes and interprets specific events in the Syrian conflict.



Animation, as a discipline, has only become a widely accepted form of non-humorous societal critique in the last three decades. The animator had long been pigeonholed into the roles of either a children's entertainment vehicle or a hired propagandist hand for totalitarian regimes. Pierce expounds on this dichotomy through a series of animated clips of a Jabhat al-Nusra bombing in Damascus. Through independent research through hundreds of video and online archives, he specifically cites archive.org and Malaysian website arrahma.com as consistent sources, Pierce forces questions of critical analysis not only in the public consumption of events, but the psychological effects of consuming information that is, and will never be, fully validated.



'It turned out to be a bombing by Jabhat al-Nusra bombing,' Pierce explains. 'In December Abu Mohammed al-Joulani went on al-Jazeera and claimed responsibility for many such bombings. Many activists had somehow hoped these images reflected the regime bombing itself.'

Crew

David Pierce Animation, directionart direction

Ayesha Jafar Translations, adaptation

Link Jones Sound design

Esraa Nageeb Voice

Moe Mohammad Chanting

