About Amer Matar
Amer Matar is an investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker.
His work brings together investigative journalism, historical research and reconstruction, archival research and spatial documentation, with a particular focus on prison and detention systems in Syria and Iraq and the violations associated with them. He reconstructs the history of these systems and the crimes committed within them through documents, testimony and archives, and by reading architecture and place as part of the evidence.
Matar began in journalism and documentary film, but his work gradually developed into a form of research into recent history. He is interested in events whose traces do not remain in a single source, but are distributed across a security file, a survivor’s memory, a building, a photograph, an administrative record, a database or an archive. A central part of his work is to bring these traces together and read them in relation to one another, to understand what can be established, what remains uncertain and what the relationships between sources reveal.
He founded and directs the Prisons Museum, a civil society organization working from Berlin and Damascus that combines investigative journalism, site documentation, document archives, survivor testimony, spatial documentation and 3D reconstruction. Its work includes the ISIS Prisons Museum, the Syria Prisons Museum and Jawab, a platform developing a protected pathway for families of the missing to search records connected to their relatives.
Before that, he founded AlShare Media Foundation in 2010 and the Syria Mobile Film Festival in 2013. Earlier phases of his work included reporting from inside Syria, documentary production, cultural projects, film training and work with local media and civil society organizations. He studied journalism at Damascus University, was arrested twice in 2011 in the context of his journalistic work and public activity during the Syrian uprising, and was tortured in detention. In 2021 he testified before the Koblenz Higher Regional Court in Germany in the trial of former Syrian intelligence officer Anwar Raslan.
Since 2017, the work has increasingly moved from documenting events to researching the systems that produced them. The search for people disappeared by ISIS could not be understood through testimony alone; it required reading detention sites, internal records, testimony, mass graves and the organization’s administrative sequence together.
After the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, Matar returned to Syria and, with the Prisons Museum team, took part in extensive documentation of prisons, security branches and records left by the Syrian detention system. Questions first developed through work on ISIS expanded to the institutions of the Syrian security state itself: how they functioned, how orders, detainees and documents moved between their parts, and what buildings, records and testimony reveal when read as components of one system.
This methodology developed collectively inside the Prisons Museum. Researchers, journalists, archivists, architects, documentation teams and technologists work to connect document to testimony, person to place, site to chronology, and administrative record to institutional structure. Tools such as 360° imaging, photogrammetry, 3D reconstruction and relational databases are used when they help test evidence or preserve its context.
Technology is not the subject of the work in itself. The aim is to build a record that can be revisited, tested and used: to understand what happened, preserve the history of places and people, support families, researchers and journalists, and make evidence available to public history and processes of justice and accountability.