Ziad Kalthoum was born in Homs in 1981 and graduated after studies in film. He has worked as an assistant director on several films, series and television programmes, including Mohammad Malas’s Ladder to Damascus (2013). In 2011, he directed his first short documentary, Oh, My Heart (2011), which was selected for the Carthage Film Festival. Kalthoum’s first feature-length documentary The Immortal Sergeant(2013), deals with the schizophrenic daily life and encounters he experiences between his mandatory military service in the Syrian Army and his role as assistant director during the shooting of Ladder to Damascus. The Immortal Sergeant was screened at the Locarno Film Festival in 2014 and the Fribourg International Film Festival in 2015.