Reflective Encounters

“Every media image of Syria of the past ten years has been of explosions, rubble, murder and misery, to the point where the average non-Syrian viewer may not be able to conceive of the country in any other way. Born in Damascus collates footage from Syrian-Scottish filmmaker Laura Wadha’s childhood summers in Syria, with memories recorded on VHS, early DV cameras and smartphones. These are images of Mediterranean beaches, teenage girls messing around, and fun and carefree holidays. Nostalgia becomes an inescapable melancholy in such a context.

Wadha reconnects with her cousin Lujain, who fled Damascus to start a new life in Canada, but the two drifted apart as they went into adulthood. Shockingly, she doesn’t remember anything of her life in Syria; “we thought [our mother] was going to bring all of our memories with her when she came to Canada,” she says. Lujain is referring to photos and keepsakes, but the sentence is also a deeply moving admission of the trauma of war and displacement on a person’s psyche. Born in Damascus is a heart-breaking record of a country that has since functionally disappeared, but also a testament to the necessity of perseverance and of bearing witness to the memory of peace.”

— Fedor Tot