Syrian pages and social media accounts published leaflets claiming Chinese actor Jackie San was in Damascus while filming scenes for his production.
But this news is not true, Jackie Chan never visited Damascus in his life.
Circulation publications titled “International Actor Jackie Chan in Al-Hajar Al-Aswad (Near) Damascus”.
The appearance of the releases comes after the first Chinese film to be shot in Syria, “Operation Home,” which began Thursday and was inspired by China’s 2015 expulsion of Chinese nationals and foreigners from Yemen. Since 2014 the country has been mired in a devastating war that has divided it between multiple parties.
The supervisors of the film, which is being produced by an Emirati company, found Yemen to be an unsafe place to shoot, so they decided to shoot it in Syria, even though the film is about a fictitious country called “Boman”.
However, if Jackie Chan is the main producer of the film, he did not come to Syria to participate in the shooting of the film in Damascus and has never visited it in his lifetime, according to Ziyad Ali, the film’s executive producer. Confirmed to AFP.
On Thursday, the agency’s reporters saw the filming of the first scenes of the film, and the director and organizers denied Jackie Chan’s participation or any Chinese actor’s visit to Syria.
“There are no acting scenes for Jackie Chan in Syria, he will not go to Damascus at the moment and he is only the main producer,” executive director Rawat Shaheen told AFP.
After more than 11 years of devastating conflict, large swaths of Syria have become open studios for scenes of destruction and war.
On Thursday, the nearly empty al-Hajar al-Aswad neighborhood bustled with Chinese staff and Syrian second-rate actors, some of them wearing Yemeni uniforms.
The ambassador of the Republic of China, which maintains strong ties with the internationally isolated Syrian authorities, attended the opening ceremony of the shooting on Thursday.
Due to fighting and bombing, large parts of Al-Hajar Al-Aswad neighborhood were razed to the ground. It has become a mass of collapsed or cracked buildings. Some of the neighborhood’s residents have returned, while the majority are still uninhabited.
Filming in a destroyed residential area caused controversy on communication platforms, at the time most of its residents had not returned to their homes due to the vast areas of destruction left by years of heavy fighting in the region.
“The war zones in Syria have become a film studio that attracts producers to shoot their films,” Syrian director Rawat Shaheen told AFP.
“Building such locations is very expensive and here is a ready-made studio suitable for anyone who wants to shoot any war-related scene,” he added.
Filming for the Chinese film will not be limited to Black Stone, but will also include other areas that have seen devastating battles, including the cities of Daraya and Douma near Damascus and the city of Homs in the center of the country.
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