Years after the Islamic State was driven out, Hajar al-Aswad, a devastated and abandoned neighborhood in the suburbs of Damascus, has found some semblance of life as an open-air studio for a Chinese film directed by martial arts superstar Jackie Chan. . Set in a fictional country called Bauman, Home Operation was actually inspired by China’s 2015 mass evacuation of hundreds of Chinese citizens and foreigners from Yemen, who were taken aboard the Chinese Navy. ships from the country have been mired in a devastating war since 2014.
The directors of the film, which is also being produced by an Emirati company, found that Yemen was not a safe place to shoot, so they decided to shoot some of the scenes in Syria. After more than 11 years of devastating conflict, large swaths of Syria have been turned into filming locations for scenes of destruction and war.
Among the destroyed buildings, the members of the group were busy setting up their equipment and deploying tanks to their positions in preparation for filming to begin. During the opening ceremony, a red banner in Arabic read, “The first Chinese film to begin filming in Syria.”
