A film about the Syrian Civil War wins in Venice

Soudade Kaadan’s The Day I Lost My Shadow, the first Syrian film ever to compete in the Venice Film Festival, was awarded the 2018 Lion of the Future, a prize given every year to a debut, feature-length film by a jury of directors, curators, and actors.

The Day I Lost My Shadow, which depicts the struggle and terror of life in the Syrian civil war, is Kaadan’s first feature film, and includes an all-Syrian cast. The film competed in the Orizzonti category of the Venice Film Festival, and was nominated for six awards, including Best Actor and Actress, Best Film, Best Screenplay, Best Director, and the Orizzonti Jury Prize.

The film appeared at a critical moment for the Syrian conflict, when the government is reportedly preparing for an assault on Idlib, the only province that remains  under the control of the rebels. The film tells the story of Sana, a woman who is living in Damascus with her young son during the particularly cold winter of 2012. When Sana goes on a quest for a gas canister, her taxi is stopped at a checkpoint near a small town just outside Damascus. There, she quickly finds herself caught up in the ravages of war.

The Day I Lost My Shadow takes place the same year that Kaadan herself escaped from Syria. In an interview with The National, Kaadan said that she considered herself fortunate to have been able to leave after the war’s outbreak. For her, it would be impossible to make a film about Syria in its current state, since its circumstances are “beyond imagination.” Yet her film manages to convey the frantic immediacy of life in a war zone, partly because it shows only three days of Sana’s life. In her statement to the Venice Film Festival, Kaadan writes, “What is tomorrow if you are living under constant bombing? Alternating between the relief to be missed by the falling missiles and the grief imagining it fell on someone else.”

Many Syrians have lived under such conditions since 2011, when protests against Bashar al-Assad’s government erupted into a multi-faceted war that involved government forces, rebels, a variety of Islamist groups and several international players. In 2015, the US, UK, and France began launching air strikes against the Islamic State, which had been occupying territory in Syria since 2013. Throughout 2016, 2017, and 2018, the Syrian government, backed by Russia and Iran, has been regaining territory from the rebel forces. The civil war has resulted in the deaths of more than 400,000 Syrians, along with 5.6 million leaving the country and 6.5 million internally displaced.

The production of the film required a lot of moving around in search of the best filming locations, according to The National. Kaadan couldn’t shoot in Syria, so most of the filming took place in Lebanon, close to the Syrian border. The actors came from France, Germany, Lebanon and Syria.

Kaadan herself was born in France and went to school in both Syria and Lebanon. She has directed and produced award-winning documentaries for Aljazeera Documentary Channel, UNDP, UNHCR and UNICEF. In 2008, Kaadan and her sister, Amira Kaadan, founded KAF, a Syrian production company with a focus on documentaries and fiction films that make viewers consider the Syrian conflict in a more human light.  

Since 2011, film has been a particularly important tool for Syrian activists wishing to capture the images of war and share them with the world. Filmmakers have also gone far beyond the video clips taken by ordinary citizens on their iPhones, to create works that reflect on the human experience of living in the midst of turmoil. These include Mohammad Ali Atassi and Ziad Homsi’s Baladna al-rahib (Our Terrible Country), the story of an intellectual and writer traveling through Syria, Randa Maddah’s Light Horizon, a video of a woman trying to clean and repair a house in ruins, and Avo Kaprealian’s Houses without Doors, which compares the current situation in Syria to the Armenian genocide.

After its premiere in Venice, the film will go on to be screened at the Toronto Film Festival and the LA Film Festival in September, and the BFI London Film Festival in October.

PHOTO: Still from the film The day I Lost my Life, directed by Soudade Kaadan.