Filmmaker Émilie Serri was not born in Syria and does not speak Arabic like her father. But that didn’t stop her from carrying out her own quest for identity through her first feature film, Damascus Dreamsa kind of documentary poetic flight mixing reality and fiction.
“I get by by not calling him,” says the filmmaker. “For me, it’s a movie. That’s all. Afterwards, people can label it whatever they want. »
What is clear, on the other hand, is the framework of the work which, without being a film about the war, is about memory. Can we remember things that we have not experienced ourselves? How do we remember through the experiences and images of others?
“What interested me the most was to see how, in the current context where we have access to all sorts of traces and archives, we can reconstruct an image of a country from fragments. »
Behind a closed door
For known reasons, some Syrians have been able, involuntarily or knowingly, to forget their country of origin so as not to rekindle an open wound. Sometimes memories are happier, but time does its work, polishing them or eroding them until they are out of reach.
“Your struggles, your ghosts, your loves and your sorrows have remained behind a closed door, engulfed under the ruins of a country that no longer exists as you had known it and to which it is impossible for me to return. A country where the last witnesses that are accessible to me are those who have left it”, says the filmmaker, in the film, addressing her father.
It was during a visit to Damascus in 2010 – his first stay with his family “as an adult” – that the idea for this film project germinated. Émilie Serri came back with questions in her head, which were initially met with her father’s silence and which reinforced her desire to know more about this country.
By combining several approaches, the filmmaker has managed to create a rich visual invoice that integrates, in addition to images shot, photos and videos from the archives of Syria or here.
“There was this idea of making a hybrid object, like a collage”, says the one who has a background that borrows from photography, cinema, the visual arts as well as journalism. Two Syrias thus rub shoulders, that of today and that of his father, rather fantasized.
“It’s a country that doesn’t exist, after all. It is this idea of homeland that does not exist geographically, but only in dreams. »
Refugee testimonies
If the story related to his father’s family is the starting point of his personal quest, it is accompanied by astonishing stagings and real testimonies of Syrian refugees from here whose memories were often fragmented, to the great astonishment of the filmmaker.
“There were times when I would come back really completely depressed, where I hadn’t been able to get what I wanted out of it. I was trying to build up a bank of memories and I was counting on these people who had known Syria to feed me,” says Émilie Serri. “That’s where dreams come in. »
Throughout the paintings, this oneirism is reflected by the outmoded decorations, the black and white images and the spectra of light, from overexposure to darkness. Made up of pulsations, panting breaths and above all silences, the sound language, on which the filmmaker has long dithered, also has a lot to do with this very assumed atmosphere of “disturbing strangeness”. “When you try to remember, there are a lot of silences. […] I wanted to leave room for that, to respect the intimacy of those moments. »
Winner of the International Critics Prize (FIPRESCI) at the Festival du
new cinema last fall, Damascus Dreams opens in Quebec on Friday.