Syrian Director Liwaa Yazji’s work “Haunted” is nominated for the “First Film Competition” at the International Film Festival Marseille, which will be held from July 1 to 7 2014, where it will also have its international premiere.
This documentary is produced with the cooperation of Heinrich Böll Stiftung-Middle East
“Haunted”, the title of Liwaa Yaziji’s film might prepare an audience to be confronted with an intangible and uncertain feeling of distress; an indefinite shadow behind one’s back.
However, by watching the film it soon becomes obvious that it might also be reality that has the ability to haunt people. The protagonists in Liwaa Yazji’s first movie are subjected to a feeling as “feathers in the wind”, powerless and condemned to passivity. In her documentary film, Yazji takes the viewer on a surreal journey through the lives of nine individuals who are either internally displaced in Syria or seeking refuge in Lebanon. “What do you consider yourself when you leave?”
Through picturing daily life activities such as packing and unpacking suitcases, doing the laundry, or complaining about the loss of a favourite coffee pot, the director strikingly captures the experience of being constantly ready to depart. It is the contrast between the simplicity of things on the one side and a restless bewilderment that seems to haunt the minds of the protagonists, which expresses the impact that a sense of uncertainty can have on persons who are deprived of their own secure and private space. Yazji’s documentation depicts how, under such circumstances, the individual becomes more and more vulnerable, exhausted, pressured. “Souls are way more important than stones and ruins”: this thought as expressed by one protagonist might leave the recipient himself haunted after the movie finished.