Experiencing Interruptions?

The Drug Mule

To feed his family amid the hardships of civil war, a young Syrian man takes a job with Hezbollah as a courier. He soon discovers that the packages he is transporting contain the drug Captagon — and his associates have been slipping crushed tablets into his tea.

  • Joseph Braude
    Director
  • Joseph Braude
    Writer
  • Joseph Braude
    Producer
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Documentary, Experimental, Short, Other
  • Runtime:
    6 minutes 39 seconds
  • Country of Filming:
    Syrian Arab Republic
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Joseph Braude

Joseph Braude, president of the Center for Peace Communications, studied Near Eastern languages at Yale and Arabic and Islamic history at Princeton. He developed his Arabic to broadcast quality over a seven-year stint on Moroccan national radio and added Persian to his Arabic and Hebrew as a graduate student at the University of Tehran.

He is the author of "The Honored Dead: A Story of Friendship, Murder, and the Search for Truth in the Arab World" (Random House, 2011); "Broadcasting Change: Arabic Media as a Catalyst for Liberalism" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018); and "Reclamation: A Cultural Policy for Arab-Israeli Partnership" (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2019).

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Director Statement

Hezbollah does not want the world to hear the voices of the millions of Arabs in Lebanon and Syria who want a different future, free of its domination. We created this unusual documentary short in order to lend a platform to one of them, using digital animation to protect his identity and provide a creative representation of his life story accompanying his actual recorded voice.