Synopsis
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.
A word from Tënk
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
