Cynara (2023)
d: Sherien Barsoum
role: legal and editorial researcher
The criminal justice system is put on trial as Canada's top defence lawyer challenges the first-degree murder conviction of a mother sentenced to life for killing her daughter.
notes on the work //
On February 19, 2011, a distraught woman calls 911. She tells the dispatcher that two men broke into her house and that her daughter, Cynara, is not breathing. When first responders arrive, they find 16-year-old Cynara without vital signs, and her mother, Cindy Ali, lying on the floor, unable to move. Mere hours later, Cynara is dead, and Cindy is the prime suspect.
Tracing back the story and tackling the research for this potential wrongful conviction with the myriad legal issues that were woven within was no small feat. Director Sherien Barsoum and I worked together to immerse ourselves in the material from top to bottom, and I leaned heavily on my training as a lawyer to carefully dissect, unpack, and translate the case.
I spent over 180 hours poring over thousands of pages of trial transcripts and evidentiary documents. With direction from Sherien, I built a custom index for us to be able to search key issues quickly. I liaised with Innocence Canada to deepen our understanding of wrongful convictions, and referenced books from my former Criminal Law professor, Elizabeth Sheehy. I read case law about women who were wrongfully convicted for harming their children, and built a library of articles, books, and references for us to start from.
Armed with all of this knowledge, I distilled thousands of pages of trial material into a 47-page timeline, carefully accounting for every second of the harrowing day Cindy spent on February 19, 2011. The timeline included sub categories for every key issue the film canvassed, and even more that didn’t make the cut. Without access to the appeal counsel’s arguments as they were ongoing, I offered my own legal analysis on the issues and potential outcomes.
As a lawyer I’ve been trained to tuck away my own biases, sit level headedly with material, and push through the work. But on the most challenging days I couldn’t extricate myself. When I read and understood that the Crown counsel had manipulated the way Cindy called Cynara a “naughty girl” – a term of endearment for many of us in South Asian families – to make Cindy out to be malicious, I silently shed a tear at my desk. Beyond this, I found myself dreaming of the words on the page – of Cindy and Cynara, Allan, and the girls, too. I was dutifully dissecting the facts during the day and reliving them in full colour at night. This is, of course, nothing in comparison to the horrors this family has gone through.
Cindy’s appeal lawyer was so impressed at the depth and the breadth of our research activities, commenting on Sherien’s dedicated preparation and by extension the work we did together to make sure she was ready to tackle this big and complicated story.
It has been an honour and the privilege of a lifetime to offer my skills so rigorously and intimately. This work remains one of my proudest career contributions to date.