Riad Chia, a Syrian director from the Unitarian Druze community, was born in As-Suwayda in 1954.
He studied at the Moscow Film Institute, where he produced a short documentary reflecting on the fate of a participant in the Great Syrian Revolt, and a graduation project, the feature film "Al-Lajat," his first long narrative work, in which he relied on visual language to express his ideas, transforming the prose of the novel "Miraj al-Mawt" (Ascension of Death) by Mamdouh Azzam into a cinematic poem.
"Al-Lajat"
"Al-Lajat" sparked much controversy in terms of its style and cinematic visual language, yet it possesses its own unique cinematic code.
Chia passed away in 2016 in a Paris hospital after a battle with illness.
