82 Names: Syria, Please Don't Forget Us

Please join us for a screening of 82 Names: Syria: Please Don't Forget Us - a documentary film that traces the journey of Mansour Omari, a survivor of torture and imprisonment in Syria. When Mansour Omari was released from prison in Syria, he smuggled out scraps of cloth sewn within the shirt he was wearing. The names of his cellmates are written on them with an ink made from blood and rust. As Omari seeks to rebuild his life in exile and visits sites in Germany that memorialize the victims of the Holocaust, he reflects on how to bring attention to the brutal regime he escaped—and counter extremist ideology in the future.

The screening will be followed by a conversation with director Maziar Bahari and Dr. Bayar Mustafa Sevdeen. Mr. Bahari is an Iranian Canadian journalist, film maker and human rights activist. He was a reporter for Newsweek from 1998 to 2011. Bahari was incarcerated by the Iranian government from June 2009 to October 20, 2009, and has written a New York Times best seller family memoir, Then They Came for Me. His memoir is the basis for Jon Stewart's 2014 film Rosewater. Bahari later founded the IranWire citizen journalism news site, the freedom of expression campaign Journalism Is Not A Crime and the street art and social justice project Paint the Change.

Dr. Bayar Mustafa Sevdeen is an assistant professor at the American University of Kurdistan (AUK). He has fifteen years of expertise in teaching about issues in Middle East and is currently active in two projects: Politics of Kurds and Kurdistan and the survival and societal transformation among the Yazidis after the last genocide. Dr. Bayar is advisor at the International Middle-East Peace Research Center (IMPR) and a member of the Steering Committee of the Center for Peace and Human Security (CPHS) at AUK.