Like all children, one day I tried to catch the thread of light coming from the sun. That might be where the story begins… or with that small orange toy, an 8mm camera my uncle gave me when I was a child of no more than five. Or perhaps the story truly began on the Corniche of Tartous, where at fourteen years old, I was walking toward “Old Tartous” to watch a screening at the cinema club. I don’t know if I realized then that I was heading toward my destiny.
At the Tartous Cinema Club, I saw for the first time a different kind of cinema. These films were not crowded with superheroes or tales full of legends. It was cinema that resembled life: its heroes were real people, walking in narrow streets, drinking coffee in simple kitchens, and sleeping under windows overlooking life. The camera approached their daily details as if holding their hand and saying: “You matter, you deserve your story to be told.” At that moment, I felt this cinema spoke about me, the teenage boy in a small city on the Mediterranean, who carried the sea in his heart and dreamed that the world would listen to him, even once. The club taught me that cinema is not only what we see but what we feel. Those weekly screenings pushed me to dive inside myself, to discover my identity on screen, and to believe that the image can be a mirror, and the Narrative can be a path
film, by its synthetic nature, allows me to transform reality into what I wish for or what I do not wish for it to be!
I see what is happening today as an exceptional moment in the course of history, and I am driven by the desire to document it as a record that time will keep to tell future generations what happened.
To be precise, I do not see war as the subject of the films I produced in Syria, but rather the human in war
To explore my filmmaking experience, you can visit the “Works” section – Artistic Projects
