Mouawiya Syasneh is fourteen when he sprays anti-Assad graffiti on a school wall in Deraa in February 2011, an act of adolescent bravado that ends with him and his friends arrested and tortured by Syrian security forces. The arrests bring residents into the streets in protest, the government answers with force, and within months the confrontation hardens into the civil war that eventually kills more than half a million people. Al Jazeera follows Syasneh from that schoolyard prank to the present, where he is a young man fighting on the front line with the Free Syrian Army, having lost his father and friends to a conflict he says he never meant to start. The film returns often to Deraa, showing shelled apartment blocks and families trying to keep some version of ordinary life going amid the fighting. Interviews include opposition figures, a former accountant turned resistance fighter, and an educator who trains children to defend themselves. Syasneh's own reckoning with what his graffiti set in motion gives the wider war a single, specific origin point to hang the story on.