In a Q&A after the screening of A Syrian Love Story in Crouch End, the host proposed to director Sean McAllister that it was “not exactly Mills and Boon”.
She’s right; but the film, five years in the making, is unmistakeably a love story. Jealousy, nostalgia, and passion are all shown in unsparing close-up – the camera is generally inches from the subjects’ faces – in this account of a marriage in crisis, for which the tragic failure of the Syrian uprising is the extraordinary backdrop.
McAllister met Amer Daoud, a Palestinian freedom fighter, in Damascus in 2008. Unlike those journalists who responded to the Syrian government’s overtures by printing puff pieces, he asked awkward questions about the detention of political prisoners. Daoud suggested he tell the story of his wife, Raghda Hasan, an Alawite (like President Bashar al Assad) but also a dissident. She was in prison, at the time, and Daoud was raising their children, including three-year-old Bob, alone.
Bob, 3, talks to his mother, in prison
Over the course of the subsequent years, McAllister filmed the family on a small camera purchased from a shop in Damascus, capturing Hasan’s release in 2011 during an amnesty prompted by the Syrian uprising, through to their exile to Lebanon, and, eventually, safety in Paris. He has also preserved evidence of a marriage under huge strain: a wife told she cannot be “both Che Guevara and a mother” and a father struggling to reconnect with the woman he fell in love with through a hole in a prison wall who has emerged, drawn, from a dungeon. The footage is intimate, occasionally uncomfortably so, filmed in the sparse apartments through which the family move in search of refuge. It’s a complete contrast to documentaries that seek to explain the Middle East through news archive footage and talking heads pontificating in the studio.
It’s extremely illuminating.
