Shout in Damascus
Last Wednesday, the third episode of the Syrian Film Festival Box Docs kicked off with a Dutch production as its opening film. Shout, directed by Sabine Lubbe Bakker and Ester Gould, is a documentary about two Golani teenagers that get the chance to study in their homeland Syria.
As a rogue desert storm swept the streets of Damascus, Kindi Cinema - a no-nonsense concrete theatre from the sixties - filled up to the rim. The walkways were totally clogged, television crews were crowding the aisles, and film enthusiasts were quite literally hanging from the balcony. As the last spectators tried to secure themselves a spot inside the projector room, a classic coming-of-age story unrolled.
We meet best friends Ezat and Bayan in their home village Majdal Shams on the Israeli occupied Golan Heights, as they prepare to cross one of the most contested and heavily guarded borders in the world. They are about to go to Syria, the motherland they only know from their parents’ stories. Two best friends, on an adventure of a lifetime.
[Screen shot]
Where the wildest thing in their village was getting drunk in the apple orchards, Damascus totally overwhelms them. The city takes them on like a pinball machine. But as Ezat passionately starts his drama classes, finds a warm welcome with his relatives in Syria, aggressively embraces his new freedoms and falls in love with the cutest girl of the school, Bayan struggles. With his study in medicine, with living by himself, but most of all with his longing for the village and the girl he left there. As the Golani students are not allowed to cross the border until the end of the term, we see him travel as close to the border as possible, as often as possible. In the cold, he and his loved one can just talk to each other by shouting through megaphones. At the end of the term, Ezat decides to stay in Syria, while Bayan goes back to his old life.
[Kindi Cinema]
Shout is a stunning documentary. It is a road trip through family life, friendship and adolescence. It is a tale of two cities. And it is about choice and decision. About checkpoints: quite literal, as the story moves back and forth through the UN guarded borderland between Israel en Syria, and on a more emotional level, as the two teenagers constantly force themselves and each other to assess their dreams and ambitions.
[Sabine Lubbe Bakker interviewed]
As the audience started discussing amongst themselves how two European girls had succeeded in making such an authentic, a-stereotypical movie, director Sabine Lubbe Bakker charmingly weaved her way through a series of interviews, in Arabic.
Shout will be screened in the Netherlands at Movies that Matter, the Amnesty International Film Festival, Sunday 28 March at the Spui Theater in The Hague.
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