Fayyad and his team were not able to attend the 90th Academy Awards ceremony, as his visa was rejected in response to President Trump's Executive Order 13780.
[1][2] As a result of making Last Men in Aleppo and The Cave, Fayyad became the subject of a vicious effort to discredit his work by pro-Putin, Russian hackers.
He documented the early peaceful demonstrations, the arrests, the ruthless, violent government response, and the shooting of protesters in an attempt to quell the rebellion.
Fayyad spent up to 18 months in his two times imprisonment, He was transferred between a number of detention center of the Syrian intelligence services facilities, Accused of spying and anti-regime activities; he was hung by his wrists for hours, beaten, lashed, and starved; kept in a filthy communal cell where it was hard to tell who was still alive.
Fayyad was the first victim to tell the Koblenz courtroom of the frankly unimaginable horror of Branch 251, “the Al-Khatib detention center” in Damascus, in the world's first case of its kind.