New Syria Film Festival brings stories of people and of hope
Syrian-born Siba Al-Khadour, has served as a board member for Toronto’s Syria Film Festival since its inception in 2015 and recently saw an opportunity to bring films to Waterloo.
Al-Khadour is co-founder of Najda Now Canada, a refugee support organization in Kitchener and she had also been working with the multicultural theatre company, MT Space.
“They’re amazing people,” she enthused. “We talked about coming together to do a project.”
Bringing the film festival to Waterloo seemed the perfect collaboration and on Nov. 17, 18 and 19, all 10 films from the Toronto Syria Film Festival will be shown at Lazaridis Hall, Wilfrid Laurier University.
The three-day festival is a partnership between MT Space, Najda Now and Laurier’s International Students Overcoming War.
“Toronto encouraged us to do our own
festival but I like to do a partnership,” she said. “We are showing the same films as shown in Toronto.”
The Toronto festival, which ran Nov. 10 to 12, started in 2015 with three screenings at the Art Gallery of Ontario. This year’s festival screened 10 films, all with Syrian stories though the films were made around the world: Syria, United Kingdom, Germany, the U.S. the Netherlands.
The three-day Waterloo festival includes several shorts as well as feature length films, several are subtitled and all tell a powerful story.
Director Zaina Erhain created a series of shorts on women activists who have fought for freedom entitled “Syria’s Rebellious Women.” One of those films, the six-minute “Mona” will be screened Nov. 18.
The dangerous business of journalism in a war torn country is featured in the film “City of Ghosts” which follows a group of activists and citizen journalists working to expose war crimes committed by ISIS. Their lives and those of their families are in constant jeopardy.
There are several films that bring a hopeful message as well. “One day in Aleppo” is a short by Ali Alibrahim, the story of a group of children in Aleppo who start painting the walls of their city as a defiant act of protest.
One film “The Island of all together” is about love and coexistence on the Greek Island of Lesbos between Syrian refugees and tourists.
The animated short “The Boy and the Sea” tells the story of a boy who dives to the bottom of the sea hoping to reclaim his shattered life.
Al-Khadour said the final film in the festival is the only one not screened at the Toronto festival. “Yellow” is by Waeel Saad Aldin, a Syrian filmmaker who had been arrested, thrown in jail and upon his release three years later, he fled to Turkey.
“Yellow” is the story of what happens to detainees in the Syrian regime, a story told by a man who experienced the human tragedy firsthand in what he calls a “bizarre reality.”
The filmmaker will be at the screening of his film, providing his visitor’s visa is approved in time.
“He’s a really good director, but he was working outside Syria,” said AlKhadour.
Proceeds from the festival support sponsorship of Syrian refugees, but more importantly, Al-Khadour hopes everyone will come out to see the films and really absorb the stories.
“Twenty-five thousand Syrians have come to Canada,” said Al-Khadour. “They didn’t know what to expect, they didn’t know what was going on.”
She believes these films will provide a basis for opening discussions about the experiences of people coming from conflict zones and it also explains why it might take refugees a long time to adjust to the peace and safety of Canada. It’s a situation most Canadians cannot identify with, as so many refugees went from war zones to refugee camps to Canada, with hardly enough time to adjust to the changes.
“Most of the documentaries talk to the people,” she said. “All the world needs to know what’s really going on.”
Al-Kadour, in her work with Najda Now Canada, said she works with Syrian refugees and has an understanding of their plight, even though she wasn’t a refugee when she arrived in 2004.
“I understand, they’re sick, they’ve lost families members,” she said. “They’re used to fighting to live. Now (in Canada) they don’t need to.”
The festival in Toronto was started as a way to share Syrian stories and hopefully evoke larger discussions about social justice, human rights and global citizenship. As AlKhadour points out, not all the films are about war but they are about the people.
The filmmakers, she said “are working really hard to send the message to the world.”