As a 22-year-old still living at home with her family in Chicago, college student Ala’a Basatneh doesn’t seem like a typical revolutionary.
Born in Syria, Basatneh moved to the U.S. at a young age and grew up as an ordinary suburban teenager. But after hearing about a group of Syrian children being brutally punished for writing anti-government slogans on their school walls, she used Facebook to contact Syrian protesters, joining the revolution from 6,000 miles away.
As the subject of the documentary #chicagoGirl, Basatneh has become one of the public faces of social media activism, using YouTube and Facebook to help citizen journalists spread the word of their fight against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's regime. The film offers an interesting glimpse into how a 19-year-old college freshman went from hanging out at the mall to spending all her free time editing protest footage and translating revolutionary slogans, becoming a key political activist in a country she hadn’t visited in over a decade.
As a 22-year-old still living at home with her family in Chicago, college student Ala’a Basatneh doesn’t seem like a typical revolutionary.
Born in Syria, Basatneh moved to the U.S. at a young age and grew up as an ordinary suburban teenager. But after hearing about a group of Syrian children being brutally punished for writing anti-government slogans on their school walls, she used Facebook to contact Syrian protesters, joining the revolution from 6,000 miles away.
As the subject of the documentary #chicagoGirl, Basatneh has become one of the public faces of social media activism, using YouTube and Facebook to help citizen journalists spread the word of their fight against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's regime. The film offers an interesting glimpse into how a 19-year-old college freshman went from hanging out at the mall to spending all her free time editing protest footage and translating revolutionary slogans, becoming a key political activist in a country she hadn’t visited in over a decade.