• 4 weeks ago
A team of archaeologists-turned-spies (Amr Al Azm, Adnan Almohamad and Katie Paul) brave Syria’s civil war and infiltrate the ranks of ISIS to uncover the greatest art theft since WW2 and unravel a conspiracy that connects Western museums and one of the world’s most powerful companies.

The documentary, which screened at the Austin Film Festival, is directed by Evan Michael Carpenter and Jacob Schwarz.
Transcript
00:00Can you start just by saying we weren't spies we were archaeologists
00:06No
00:09Because we were spies
00:12I'm a professor of Middle East history and anthropology. I taught archaeology in Damascus and I came to the US in 2011
00:21We broke out in Syria
00:24Someone might reach out to you on Facebook and say I used to be your student in Syria
00:28There's a lot of looting going on. I
00:30Noticed a lot of artifacts were looted from this sites
00:34Looting has been going on for as long as humanity has been burying their dead with goodies
00:38But one of these guys came up to me and he's telling me looting is now a revenue stream for Isis
00:45I
00:46Remember pushing my chair back and I just said I gotta do something. I didn't know how I was going to do it
00:52I had no I just felt I needed to be involved
00:54Somehow we started to help archaeologists inside sir
01:05Collect evidence and send this information outside of the region
01:12We're talking massive black markets for antiquities organized mafias smuggled these goods into the West
01:19We felt that we must document these disappearing items now
01:23You either sat at home and went crazy or you went out and did something
01:30I don't know. I'm not gonna come with a scene. I look dear. What's my penis here?
01:35There are no authorities that are gonna go in and seize this. So I pretend to be a middleman
01:42By then I was already on Isis's kill list
01:45Oh
01:50He had the only evidence that this ever existed
01:55Now anybody can traffic Isis looting Facebook
02:03Okay, we're really on to something
02:06Some people think that antiquity is the past for me. No, it's me. It's my family. It's the prison the future
02:15And
02:19That's why we do it

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