Feras Fayyad

Feras Fayyad (born September 20, 1988) is a Syrian film director, producer, and writer. Fayyad best known for his 2017 documentary ''Last Men in Aleppo and his 2019 documentary The Cave,'' both films earned him critical acclaim and numerous awards and nominations including two Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, making him the first Syrian director to be nominated for an Oscar. Fayyad also won an Emmy award for Best Current Affairs Documentary, was nominated for a creative Emmy for best writing and directing, and has received two George Foster Peabody awards and a nomination for Outstanding Directorial Achievement from the Directors Guild of America for his movie The Cave.

Right from the beginning, his works dealt with the situation in his homeland Syria and the political shifts in the Arab world. His 2011 documentary "On the Other Side" (CZ). As a result, Fayyad was arrested in Damascus in late 2011, and he was subjected to extreme violence and torture during his two times imprisonment.

David France in The New York Times called Fayyad “ one of the most soulful documentary filmmakers working today” while Allen Johnson of San Francisco Chronicle wrote that "Fayyad is a humanitarian, and his approach in "The Cave" demonstrates that."

Fayyad and his team were not able to attend the 90th Academy Awards ceremony, as his visa was rejected in response to President Trump's Executive Order 13780.

As a result of making Last Men in Aleppo and The Cave, Fayyad became the subject of a vicious effort to discredit his work by pro-Putin, Russian hackers. In testimony in Koblenz's courtroom, He gives key testimony against a convicted war criminal officer who led a unit of Syria's General Intelligence Directorate and involved in Fayyad's torture as a result of his testimony he turned subject to an organized attack from a tabloid anti-migrants websites. Provided by Wikipedia