Damascus Dreams
How does one remember a homeland they are so deeply connected to and disconnected from? When Canadian-born filmmaker Emilie Serri travels to Syria for the first time in ten years, she feels alienated. A year later, when her grandmother dies and the war begins, she tries to piece back together an image of this elusive country she desperately wants to call her own. Gathering evidence from the past, stories from refugees and bringing along her father for the ride, she embarks on a lucid dream journey hoping to resurrect a fading connexion with her homeland and her father.
| Directors | Émilie Serri, Émilie Serri |
| Actors | Hubert Sabino-Brunette, Hubert Sabino-Brunette, Charlotte Lehoux, Charlotte Lehoux |
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In a car traveling along a road revealing a Quebec landscape, the filmmaker asks her father two questions about his youth and his country, Syria, a country she knows only from having visited a few times, and whose language she does not speak. The father avoids answering, but this hybrid film diminishes the distance by transporting us into a fragmented collective memory, composed of several testimonies from Syrian immigrants, photographs, family archives, poetic reconstructions, and more. From this coexistence of voices, approaches, and mediums, a multifaceted narrative emerges, with which the filmmaker engages in a very personal and artistic manner. Highly inventive, this first feature film by experimental filmmaker Émilie Serri unfolds a complex, fascinating, and touching reflection on memory, belonging, identity, grief, and possible futures, as well as on the ethical responsibility of the artist and the power of cinema.
Hubert Sabino-Brunette
Programmer and teacher
-
Français
1h23
Language: Français
Subtitles: Français -
English
1h23
Language: English
Subtitles: English
- Année 2021
- Pays Quebec
- Durée 83
- Producteur Portage Films
- Langue Arab, French, English
- Sous-titres French, English
- Résumé court A filmmaker’s journey to her inaccessible homeland as she composes a Syria that stands somewhere between reality and myth, dream and nightmare, past and present.
- Mention festival FIPRESCI Prize · Festival du nouveau cinéma 2021
- Ordre 1
In a car traveling along a road revealing a Quebec landscape, the filmmaker asks her father two questions about his youth and his country, Syria, a country she knows only from having visited a few times, and whose language she does not speak. The father avoids answering, but this hybrid film diminishes the distance by transporting us into a fragmented collective memory, composed of several testimonies from Syrian immigrants, photographs, family archives, poetic reconstructions, and more. From this coexistence of voices, approaches, and mediums, a multifaceted narrative emerges, with which the filmmaker engages in a very personal and artistic manner. Highly inventive, this first feature film by experimental filmmaker Émilie Serri unfolds a complex, fascinating, and touching reflection on memory, belonging, identity, grief, and possible futures, as well as on the ethical responsibility of the artist and the power of cinema.
Hubert Sabino-Brunette
Programmer and teacher
-
Français
Duration: 1h23Language: Français
Subtitles: Français1h23 -
English
Duration: 1h23Language: English
Subtitles: English1h23
- Année 2021
- Pays Quebec
- Durée 83
- Producteur Portage Films
- Langue Arab, French, English
- Sous-titres French, English
- Résumé court A filmmaker’s journey to her inaccessible homeland as she composes a Syria that stands somewhere between reality and myth, dream and nightmare, past and present.
- Mention festival FIPRESCI Prize · Festival du nouveau cinéma 2021
- Ordre 1
