Please note that Flood will be presented with English subtitles and La terre de Gevar with French subtitles.
FLOOD (الطوفان)
AlMourad Aldeeb, 2022, Germany, 11 min, German with English subtitles
On 14th July 2021, the Ahr Valley in the Rhineland (Germany) suffered a natural disaster: a flood took the lives of more than 130 people. The town of Ahrweiler looks like a ghost town – a dystopian sight. Abdo, an inhabitant of the town, shares the sorrow of loss and relives the feeling of fear and powerlessness. For Abdo, who was born and raised in Syria, it is not the first disaster.
Almourad Aldeeb (he/him) is a Syrian filmmaker based in Germany. He was born and raised in Homs, Syria 1991. Currently, he is studying film at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany. His practice is a search for a poetic expression, reflective and intense.
LA TERRE DE GEVAR (أرض جيفار)
Qutaiba Barhamji, 2020, France, Qatar, 78 min, Arabic with French subtitles
Gevar comes from Syria and has recently started living in a suburb of Reims in France with his girlfriend and young son. He has decided to rent a plot at a community garden to grow his own vegetables. Over four seasons, he discovers what an effort it takes for him and his seedlings to put down roots in a new place. The intimacy of the setting for this story—the family home and the allotment garden—makes all the more tangible the melancholy felt by Gevar, his family, and their Syrian friends. The film reveals a family doing its utmost to start a new life, to leave their old life behind, and to deal with all the challenges that come along with these changes.
Born in the Damas suburbs, director, producer and editor Qutaiba Barhamji spent his childhood between Syria and Russia, where he studied medicine. In 2005, he settled in Paris and studied film at ESEC. In 2016, he made the short Wardé, coproduced and broadcast by Arte. In parallel, he has worked as an editor on some thirty documentary and fiction films, including Still Recording by Saeed Al Batal and Ghiath Ayoub, Fawzi Saleh’s Poisonous Roses and L’Homme qui penche by Olivier Dury and Marie-Violaine Brincard. His first feature length documentary film as a director, Gevar’s Land participated in more than 20 festivals including Cinéma du Réel, Doclisboa, Jihlava, IDFA 2020.
Co-presented with the Regards syriens collective as part of the 7th edition of Syria Sees You.
EST - English subtitles
CC - Closed captions
