If you’re going to make the first-ever virtual-reality movie filmed inside a war zone, you might as well do it in the most dangerous city on the planet. So that’s exactly where 20-year-old Christian Stephen went.
Welcome to Aleppo, released last month by the news site RYOT, features a 360-degree-view of Syria’s largest city—one of the oldest in the world—as it stands today, in chaos and rubble. Viewers can hear muezzins’ calls to prayer echoing through the streets, mixed with the percussive sounds of war. But what is most striking is what you don’t see: people. The footage immediately asks the viewer to reckon with Aleppo’s virtual emptiness, a reminder of the 4.1 million displaced Syrians waiting in refugee camps or flooding across Middle Eastern and European borders to any nation willing to help (and, increasingly, to the unwilling ones as well).

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