cristabel suture: Yasmin Fedda - Tale of Two Syrias

Monday, April 15, 2013

Yasmin Fedda - Tale of Two Syrias - Women Talking

Yasmin Fedda?s documentaries are made under the title Tell Brak Films.? Named after an area in North East Syria where Agatha Christie?s archaeologist husband Max unearthed little, large-eyed offerings to the all-seeing God, Yasmin?s films would seem to be her offering.

Patricia McLoughlin went to see her ?Tale of Two Syrias? documentary at the Bird?s Eye View Festival in London?s Barbican.

The fact that this young filmmaker gained access to make her documentary in the dying months of the Assad regime is remarkable enough in itself.? She is quiet spoken, delightfully understated and demurs at any suggestion of this being a brave film in dangerous territory.

?Yes, I knew the effects of the dictatorship on daily life while I was filming.? However, I didn?t think my film was about that until I started editing.? It was all very subtle, the lines you could not cross, and it does give a taste of what was happening then.?

Then was a year before Syria?s uprising and who was two people living in Syria, both ultimately vulnerable and both irresistible personalities with very different dreams.? Salem, an Iraqi refugee and fashion designer living in Damascus, and Botrus, a monk in the isolated hilltop monastery of Mar Musa, are colourful characters seeking their own kind of freedom as Syria descends into chaos and destruction.

Their narratives give an insight into different lives and the beautifully shot film gives a glimpse of the landscape, teeming city streets and marketplaces that were the backdrop to Syria before the uprising.

Fedda, at 32, has been immersed in Syria all her life. Born in Kuwait, her grandmother and her grandmother?s parents lived there and it was visiting her grandmother, who took her to the Mar Musa monastery that served as inspiration for ?Tale of Two Syrias?.?

Married to Dan Gorman, Director of Firefly International, a charity providing long-term children?s arts projects in areas like Bosnia, Fedda has been making documentaries for eight or nine years, having come to the UK to study social anthropology and then do a Masters in visual anthropology.

Her family is scattered across the Middle East and her over riding interest is in using film to open a dialogue between people. She was awarded a PhD scholarship by Edinburgh University and has been helped by the Scottish Documentary Institute?s Bridging the Gap project,?which she says is a tremendously worthwhile and supportive group helping young filmmakers to develop.

Her latest work brought postproduction dilemmas. ?Syria was a completely different place so editing was hard.?I?m still in touch with a lot of friends there and it is a very difficult reality, having gone from dictatorship to lives and places being destroyed.

?There was little indication of what was to come when I was filming. There was hope maybe that things could change but they changed radically.? In retrospect, when I was making the film it was growing, if you had a dictatorship and repression,?if the government kept killing people what did they have to lose??

An Arab woman filmmaker is a title that sits uncomfortably on Fedda.? ?I don?t really like classification, although I recognise that there is a need for a platform. But to be Arab?? There are so many peoples, it?s so diverse.?

And that diversity is well illustrated in her film. Fedda had to submit a script and promise the authorities?to stay within it. ?I didn?t really have a set script though,? she says. ?I reacted to realities as they happened, to circumstances as they unfolded.?

She certainly captured a moment in time for Syria.?

Patricia McLoughlin