Syrians won’t be hurt by some filmmaker borrowing images of their suffering as a metaphor so as to make images of his own personal or collective suffering. Ahmed Ghossein won’t be the first in this regard, nor will he be the last. Ultimately cinema, like all art, is merely a copy of an original. The fundamental problem with Ahmed Ghossein’s film was and will be that he borrowed an original to produce a copy of a lost original. Those who were stabbed in the heart by Ahmed Ghossein are the Lebanese themselves, the ones whose suffering at the hands of... more

Translation by Stefan Tarnowski     During my five years of research on the uses and grammars of video in the context of revolt then war in Syria, many images have touched me, overwhelmed me. Others have shocked me, wounded me. And yet out of this visual, aural and emotional accumulation, three videos stand out. They permeate my memory and my thought. Each inscribed in its own way in a grey, intermediate zone, where vision is blurred and the modes of perception are redefined. In this precarious place, it is difficult to draw the boundary between an intentional filmic gesture, marked above all... more

  The horizon splits the frame, a third of which unfolds destroyed cement buildings and then merges into the ruins. In the remaining two-thirds, purple-tinted clouds sink in the buildings immersed in black. The frame follows a path that leads to the destroyed buildings. From the depth of the ruins, a woman emerges. She’s wearing a black coat and a patterned veil and holding a bouquet of chrysanthemums. In slow steps, she proceeds to place the bouquet on a mound of ruins. She turns to the frame and says: The war is over.   It’s holiday. The ads of the film fill up... more

  Orwa Al Mokdad starts a journey from Daraa, southern Syria, to Aleppo, northern Syria, to understand the reasons that have shattered the whole Arab region over the country’s history and the distance that has grown for the past five years, since the beginning of the Syrian war. A distance that has split the region and its inhabitants into North and South. This film has received the support of Bidayyat’s documentary grant 2014

Death has come to dominate the lives of Syrians. They have grown used to it; it’s the thing they are most familiar with. But what happens when one of them cannot get used to it? Rafia is a young woman from Damascus who is terrified of the ever-increasing incidence of death around her. She starts asking questions, a quest that is an attempt to face her fears. She talks to a pious family man who sees in death the joy of meeting with God, a woman who lost her son, who has to live with his death on a daily basis,... more

In my city, Al Zabadani, you learn that death is not man’s worst nightmare, even though facing it and fleeing it are the only things left to do. After spending a few days in this city of mine you realize that your very worst nightmare is to lose everything you have for the sake of a dream of freedom, and not to obtain that dream. Your worst nightmare is to live within the memory of a place, which was, for a day, vast and spacious and free, now returned, by war, to the Very tight and dark space it had... more

The revolutionary movement of Syria not only asked for a political change when it took the streets in 2011, but also to reaffirm the existence of individuality in society. Our personal individuality was brutally oppressed by the dictatorial one-party rule and the purely state-controlled organizations and trade unions, which attempted to make people ideologically uniform from the youngest age through the youth-based Baathist organizations. With the recapturing of our personal identity, we Syrians regained a public space to express our thoughts and ideas through creativity and arts. But at the same time, we are confronted with new questions. Have we... more

One hundred years have not been enough to remove the effect of the massacres and forced displacement on the Armenian people at the hands of the Ottomans since 1915 until today. Back then, Armenians endured a long journey of misery in an attempt to find a safe place to live in this harsh world, fleeing from their homeland Armenia to Syria, where they eventually found refuge, especially in the city of Deir ez-Zor. The people of Deir ez-Zor offered the Armenians fleeing from death safety and a new beginning.  Today, 100 years later, the Armenians of Deir-ez-Zor have to go... more

The revolution is still ongoing, but in a different way. The daily incidents and reports have created a distance from what is supposed to be of our own making. The revolution of holding flowers, olive branches and banners is over, and on a new morning, the same young people went to join the front fighting of the Free Syrian army, though in different locations and points in time. On another morning, they successively met in a house of the Theshreen neighborhood which they call their headquarter. Here, people are preoccupied with life, but death is constant emergency. Observing the interaction... more

Ahmad is a child. He was born in 1998 in one of the poorest suburbs of Damascus  “Hajr Al Aswad”. With the revolution, Ahmed left Damascus with one of his brothers for the northern city of Idlib, but was critically injured by the regular army during an anti-regime protest. In order to rest, Ahmad was taken to the city of Aleppo - a city where Ahmed eventually will join the Free Syrian army as a child soldier to fight alongside with his new companions on the front lines of this city. With each day of living and fighting with his fellow combatants... more