Mr. Chan,

I saw on a Syrian news site that you are shooting a movie under your production in the ruined neighborhood of al-Hajar al-Aswad, to tell the story of the evacuation of Chinese citizens from a city engulfed in the flames of civil war.

Let me tell you a little bit about al-Hajar al-Aswad.

In this poor and marginalized neighborhood, there used to live a diverse group of locals. Their children would go to the cinema to watch your movies, and come back to share the experiences they had learned from your martial arts moves. They would sit in the small rooms that their parents struggled to furnish with the things children love, and they would discuss your movie after seeing it, and reenact their favorite scenes from it. Perhaps you may even find a poster bearing your picture in one of the rooms that had been built on the roof of the house, if there is even any trace of these rooms left

Those same children had been forced out of the neighborhood you are filming in and the one they loved and lived in all their lives. Perhaps you also do not know that al-Hajar al-Aswad witnessed massive demonstrations calling for freedom, and that these demonstrations were met with live bullets, and that some residents of the neighborhood were killed under torture in Syria’s prisons, while those who survived were prevented from returning to rebuild their homes

I never understood why people were prevented from going back to their devastated regions after they were taken back under regime control, but it now seems that they were prevented so that you could have the largest live war studio, and for regime supporters to brag that they provided you with such an exceptional filming location. A recurring statement that has been mentioned in several interviews over this new production of yours explains that building a studio similar to al-Hajar al-Aswad costs a great amount of money, and that you got this filming location for peanuts.

I must tell you, Mr. Chan, that the cost has not been cheap at all. The price paid has surpassed three hundred thousand civilian deaths, seven million displaced people outside the country, and six million displaced persons inside Syria. You should know, Mr. Chan, that at least 250,000 Syrians have been forcibly disappeared and their fate is still unknown to this day. So do you really still think that the cost was cheap?

Take a good look around you on the set, perhaps you’ll find sofas that were once in my friend’s house before it was bombed. Look among the scattered and abandoned photos for the stories of the families whose members are dispersed in this vast land

Look around you while you are shooting, perhaps you will find the tracks and footprints of the area’s residents that adorned the roads as they went back and forth, or perhaps you will be unable to find their tracks, since the airstrikes have left no trace of anything. Do you know, Mr. Chan, that we once walked these roads?