Since the outbreak of uprisings in Syria in 2011, which later became the ongoing armed conflict, the Syrian population has been using small digital cameras and personal mobile phones to produce a vast number of images as graphic testimonies of the crucial events taking place in the country. The documentary essay Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait (2014), co-directed by Ossama Mohammed and Wiam Simav Bedirxan, was partly made remixing these vernacular videos found online. This article is an aesthetic and sociocultural analysis of the film with the aim of remarking on the role of cameras and the power of images and cinema in a conflict such as the Syrian war, defined by a deep intermingling of actual and virtual struggle. How can the use of vernacular video of the Syrian conflict in film works influence the shaping of public perceptions of the conflict and launch a truly political reflection about it? To what extent can images be used as a political weapon in a hyper-mediatized era where, having proliferated to infinity, images have lost their strength? I argue that the political capacity of images is not only limited, it also depends to a great extent on mediations, gatekeepers and the material conditions of their production and dissemination, their motivations, creators and propagators, and on the aesthetical strategy used to (re)contextualize them and (re)shape the dominant representations of the conflict given by the mass media and by the authorities.