About 27,000 photos of dead and tortured civilian detainees were smuggled out of Syrian government secret archives by a military defector codenamed “Caesar” and made public in 2014. They were presented to the United Nations as evidence of the Bashar al-Assad regime’s killing of 11,000 civilian detainees in a single region between March 2011 and August 2013. After the search for justice failed to produce any prosecutions, victims’ families turned to the courts in Europe.

This two-part documentary series, The Lost Souls of Syria, follows two cases for more than five years – one in Spain, where a woman identifies her brother as one of the bodies from Caesar’s photos, and another in France, where a dual national helps his lawyer investigate the disappearance of his brother and nephew. The film includes testimony from Caesar and his accomplice, “Sami”.