Kareem Rahma’s Damascus Doc Will Be The Best Thing You Watch Today

The last time I watched Syria on screen, I remember sitting very upright, my face turned really away from my brother. It was probably because I was a bit too overwhelmed from the exhilaration of discovering something fundamentally forbidden in our time. No, really. James May, Richard Hammond and Jeremy Clarkson speeding through Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Jordan, and encountering some unbelievable scenes is a moment I have since watched over and over again.

Yesterday, while I watched Subway Takes host Kareem Rahma get into Damascus resident and tour guide Bashar’s yellow cab to be driven around the ancient metropolis devastated by a dictatorship and war, that whole experience kept getting surfaced and dismantled. I don’t quite know what about the region really gets me feeling. But there’s something about discovering life going on defiant beneath iron fists… and food that’s freaking amazing.

In an extended episode of his show Keep the Meter Running, “What Life’s Actually Like in Damascus Today”, released as a standalone 55-minute documentary, Rahma comes face to face with the dusty majesty of the Old City. He gets fed Syrian fúl and the world’s oldest ice cream by hand, bonds over Julia Roberts and ABBA with Bashar, discovers the poignant ruins of his host’s devastated hometown of Jobar and gazes at the city lighting up by the side of Mount Qasioun. In all of that, the host has brought back the Anthony Bourdain school of travel documentary filmmaking that is so captivating to watch. Rahma’s voiceovers act as interludes but don’t editorialise. His access point to a place is, like the late chef and TV host’s method, through its food.

Over the past couple of years, Rahma’s Subway Takes has gone from cultural phenomenon to press tour for celebrities these days, but with this film, he’s done something important. The Egyptian-American has travelled to a place still battling deeply unfair cultural perceptions accompanying West-influenced travel advisories. Deeply overcome with the tender humanity of Damascus and Damascenes, when I paused for a bit and Googled ‘travel to Syria’ (yes, guilty as charged), the AI overview screamed “Hell, no, danger!” to my eyes.

So I went back to Rahma making frenetic stopovers at markets thronged by ordinary locals, eating freely at restaurants and drinking coffee at a ramshackle kiosk with a coffee machine. His little detour to a mosaic shop brought back the innocence of my own journey of independent travel a decade ago. Rahma chatting up the owner of the shop—another Kareem—reminded me of my own extended exchange with a curiosity-shop owner in Punta Arenas, sixteen thousand kilometres away.

He visits a basketball academy for children and engages in a game with them. One wonders if the dangers warned about this place on the internet are real, and if so, exactly how much. That curiosity and potential for an open mind is essential in an increasingly polarised world.

Though I’m still not entirely charmed by our host’s occasional sniggers at his companion’s expense (but then even matching Bourdain’s composure and capacity for self-deprecation is unthinkable), the film has moments of genuine amusement. Bashar, the cabbie, is a romantic man capable of huge amounts of nostalgia and passion, and Rahma lets him grab the spotlight as a lifelong lover of Damascus. Bashar recounts rushing back to his homeland from Dubai in 2019, where he worked with FedEx, after a panicked phone call from his mother as the civil war started.

In a particularly touching sequence, Bashar, Rahma and their local producer Eyad Nemer, visit the ruins of Jobar, which used to be a lively neighbourhood with a synagogue going back 2,700 years. Bashar, having grown up here, is overcome with emotion at the rubble left behind in the wake of the war. Losing a home can never be easy—it’s always way, way more painful than you will imagine. If you have to imagine it, that is. All while the other Bashar—the country’s exiled former dictator Bashar al-Assad and his family—finds another cosseted version of life in Russia (as reported by The Guardian in December 2025).

In recent memory, this has been the pariah of all places in the world. To a world so synonymised with random and unpredictable death, this is the humanisation that it so desperately needs. Which is why What Life’s Actually Like in Damascus Today keeps reminding viewers that life finds a way. Rahma eats and pounds pistachio ice cream at a shop touted as the world’s oldest ice cream parlour, eats shawarma off the rotisserie, nukes sugar candy at small shops, goes bonkers at a karaoke bar and breaks character to give his shades to Bashar at a café.

The film closes with a BTS montage of Chiquitita, a song Bashar admitted to loving (not just liking). The three men sing it at the karaoke bar, the twilight sets in as Damascus streets go on, Rahma and Bashar share a smoke and our host captures the city on his tiny film camera. As Bashar says at the end, “I cannot express about my feelings.”

Here’s where you can watch it.