Unknown (AFP) – When singer Shadi Safadi and his bandmates were trying to come up with a concept for a low-budget video for their band ‘Safar’ in a country plagued by power cuts, they decided that if they couldn’t get around the outages they would use them. The resulting video struck a chord with most of the Syrian population, which has spent long unventilated summer evenings in the dark. The video for ‘Ya Weel Weely’, which topped five million views on YouTube within days of its release, was shot entirely in a small room lit by battery-powered devices.
