The Story Won't Die

Braiding the reflections of nine variously affected individuals on the subject, David Henry Gerson’s film successfully keeps the big picture and the smaller canvas in conscientious balance, disrupting overwhelming tragedy with more hopeful flashes of invention and inspiration.

If Gerson’s brisk supercut style can feel frustratingly cursory at times, he chooses wisely to concede the stage to the artists — rousing scenes from concerts and recitals are the film’s highlights — rather than turn them into data points for an exhaustive account of the refugee crisis.

The Story Won’t Die gives us hope that what happened in Syria won’t be drowned out or forgotten and that bold artistic expression that disrupts the West’s status quo will also not die. These young Syrian artists keep such hopes alive.