What is it like to flee home, and then remember what happened there before you did? What does it feel like to never know when, or if, you will return? As exiled Syrian journalist and dissident Samar Yazbek once wrote, "Exile is exile, and nothing else. It means walking down the street and knowing that you don't belong there".
A new film by Beirut-based Syrian filmmaker Saeed al-Batal, one of the countless activists and artists who have settled in the city since 2011, records just that feeling by filming an imagined walk through Beirut, after fleeing a besieged neighbourhood in Damascus. It is filmed from the perspective of a semi-autobiographical character trying to make sense of where he is: a first-person exile's view of exile. [...]
For Batal, the film records a time of uprooting and alienation, one that gave him a mirrored view of Beirut and the city he had left behind. "It was a kind of therapy … to walk around in a city with no destruction, no news happening, and just film. I wasn't even sure if I could balance picture without destruction, because I always used to use [it] to balance my pictures [in Syria]," he said, remembering the contrasts between the two cities. [...]
"The most difficult discovery [arriving from Syria] is that you are not the centre of the universe: no one cares as much as you think, and life is still going on and people are still living," Batal said. "If you've lived through a big crisis, you feel that that's going to be the centre of the universe… especially if you witnessed things like chemical attacks."
But people "got bored" of Syria, he said, adding that it is up to Syrians to change their approach. "I know that we [Syrians] are feeling … as if we own the right to be angry at the world, but we need to learn from these past five years. If we don't come up with a solution, the world won't care enough to solve our problems for us. We need to face the mirror."
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