Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam

[2] The film presents footage of young male laborers, machinery and construction scaffolding (in imitation of Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, whom Amiralay admired),[3] shots of the still water and boats moving across it, and footage of Bedouins living nearby to the construction site of the Tabqa Dam in the months before their evacuation from the region that would become the dam's reservoir, Lake Assad.

A montage in the film juxtaposes the industrial machinery of the dam's construction with shots of a limestone statue of the ancient Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, dated to the eighteenth century BCE and excavated near the Euphrates from Mari.

[2] R. Shareah Taleghani describes Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam as "a wholesale celebration of the life-changing potential of the state's early modernization and development projects".

Everyday Life in a Syrian Village was banned in Syria, as most of Amiralay's films would be, for its implicit criticism of the failures of the state.

In A Flood in Baath Country, Amiralay repurposed footage from Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam as self-critique for his "naive" initial enthusiasm about the Ba'ath party, for which he felt deep shame in the aftermath of three decades of Ba'ath rule in Syria.