Year of production: 2014
Director: Collectif Abounaddara
Film duration: 52 min
> The film
A driver looking for his way in Damascus, a big mufti who betrays himself cheerfully, soldiers who dance with their weapons, a man who would like to be able to cry his father, a woman who laughs in front of a bearded man in lattice, children with blurred eyes by horror. These are some fragments of history that cinema can show in the face of the flow of current images that give to see Syria as a "country of Evil".

Collectif Abounaddara
The Abou Naddara collective brings together self-taught Syrian filmmakers who, since the beginning of the demonstrations against the dictatorship in March 2011, publish every Friday on the internet a film of their own. One to five minutes of weekly cinema to tell the story of today’s Syria and respond, in their own way, to the call for freedom. Their references: the avant-garde Soviet director Dziga Vertov, but also their older Syrian filmmakers, including the subversive documentary filmmaker Omar Amiralay, who died on the eve of the revolution.

Screening followed by discussion with:

Charif Kiwan
In 2010, Charif Kiwan co-founded the Collective of Anonymous Syrian Filmmakers, Abounaddara, who voluntarily produce short documentaries and broadcast them on the internet.
Pascale Cassagnau
Pascale Cassagnau is a doctor in art history and art critic, Inspector General of Creation, responsible for audiovisual and new media collections at the National Center for Plastic Arts (Ministry of Culture). She is co-curator of the exhibition Les Sentinelles presented at IMA-Tourcoing.
Camille Leprince
Researcher at the Centre national des arts plastiques and co-curator of the exhibition Les Sentinelles presented at IMA-Tourcoing until 12 February 2023, Camille Leprince has been developing artistic and cultural projects since 2011 in the wake of the Arab revolts. Her thesis in aesthetics started in 2020 at the EHESS focuses on studying the feeling of an era under its poetic and political prism in the aftermath of the uprisings and during the war with a focus on documentary cinema in Syria.
Nathalie Delbar
Nathalie Delbard is a professor in Fine Arts at the University of Lille, researcher at the CEAC and art critic. His research in the field of contemporary photography focuses in particular on the devices of production, exhibition and diffusion of the image, and their double inscription in the field of art and in the social space.

In partnership with Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains