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Syria: Chess Match at the Borders.

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Syria: Chess Match at the Borders, A Film by Amal Hamelin des Essarts, Icarus Films, 2008, $390 (http://icarusfilms.com/new2008/syr.html).

While voiced largely in French (with good English subtitles), this film offers a superb panorama of politics in the Near East, centered on Syria rather than the usual Israeli and Palestinian vantage points. The film sums up postwar Syrian history and its legacy of three defeats at the hands of Israel (1956, 1967 and 1973), albeit without observing how the original defeat of 1948 led to the series of military coups finally culminating in nearly four decades of rule by the Asad family (1970-). The film then goes on to view its contemporary regime through the prisms of official (and very sympathique) Syrians, opponents of the military police state, Lebanese opponents, and a variety of international observers from former French ambassador and Le Monde correspondent Eric Rouleau to George Bush. The result is a generous feast of perspectives that enables a perspicacious viewer to reach his or her own conclusions about Syria. It may help to liberate educated American viewers from the conventional mainstream press bias against this alleged accomplice of the "axis of evil" (North Korea, Iran and Iraq until 2003) without sugarcoating Syria's police...

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