Director: Soudade Kaadan

Stars: Hala Zein, Kinda Alloush, Samer al Masri, Nizat Alani

Sprinklings of magic realism enliven this slightly staid drama from writer-director Soudade Kaadan. The title in Arabic means ‘the displacement of souls, water and people’. It revolves around a family who have remained in their family home in a Damascus that has been all but levelled by bombings. The fiercely proud engineer and family patriarch Mutaz (al Masri) insists they stay as he is shamed by the thought of becoming a refugee, despite pleas from his wife Hala (Alloush). Zeina (Zien) their fourteen-year-old daughter also lives with them; her elder sisters have already left. When the house suffers a direct hit by a bomb and the ceiling caves in, flooding the house with light, Mutaz drapes chintzy material over the ceiling and walls. There is untapped black comedy potential in the depiction of a family attempting to maintain a semblance of normality in the face of such chaos. The hole in the ceiling means Zeina can visit Amer (Alani), the cute boy upstairs in the apartment above, by climbing up a tied bedsheet. Swooping camerawork prevents the household drama from becoming too stagey, while Kadaan interjects moments of lyricism and flights of fancy into Zeina’s life, including a lovely sequence where she lies down, beaming on her bed nicely framed by the circular ceiling hole. There are moments of nascent eroticism too such as when Zeina and Amer enjoy a bowl of blackberries together, and some bitter irony when Zeina and her mother go for a rare night-time excursion outside and the latter confesses that this is the safest she has ever felt while out walking.

David Willoughby

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