BEIRUT — Seven former Syrian political prisoners sat at a sparse dinner table, taking turns describing their cells. Some had lived alone in a pitch-black room barely a meter high, and others were in a 12-by-6-meter dungeon with over a hundred other men.

It was the opening scene of the play “Untitled,” held at Beirut’s Zoukak Theatre Company on Nov. 11. “Untitled” was the final performance of the 10-day Sidewalks Festival, an event showcasing local and international plays, films and workshops.

The play was written and performed by the members of the non-governmental organization Former Lebanese Political Detainees in Syria (FLPDS), in collaboration with UMAM Documentation & Research, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to creating a stable Lebanon. Each of the seven men spent between 10 and 15 years in Syrian prisons, primarily the infamous Tadmor prison in Palmyra. 

The Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian actors took the audience through a typical day in the life of a political prisoner. They shared how they would make a birthday cake out of their weekly rations of seven teaspoons of jam, stale bread, weak tea and a fifth of an apple and explained the slang they developed like the ‘night’ who would watch out for the prison guards while others were sleeping and the “sharra’a," a small hatch in the cell where food, however rarely, appeared.