This is a review of Return to Homs (2013) (as screened with a Q&A)
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25 July
This is a review of Return to Homs (2013), as screened before a Q&A at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge (@Campicturehouse), on Tuesday 8 July 2014, when producer Orwa Nyrabia substituted for Talal Derki, the film’s writer / director
It might well have helped if one’s well-being and state of mind allowed one ‘to follow’ news’ stories (as we seem to say) : understandably, producer Orwa Nyrabia and others shown in the film felt – and even sang – that the world had, specifically, betrayed people in Syria, since the subject of the film (unlike the discussion in the Q&A) was just Syria and where Homs lay in what has happened since the popular uprising in 2011.
However, that is an assertion that needs to be looked at in context – and, with tempers running high at times in the Q&A, that did not happen there. That said, one questioner / speaker berated the film for not giving voice to the protagonists’ opposing fellow Syrians (although the film had plainly never been intended to be the type of documentary that asks those implicated on the government side for a statement or comment, and then, as the case may be, includes it, or reports that giving one had been declined).
Another questioner / interjecter, irritated by what the representative present from Amnesty International had been saying about the lack of reporting on Syria in the West and in the UK, wanted to tell her that John Simpson is on the t.v. every night, broadcasting from Iraq and Syria. That may be true – although it would be taxing, not to say confusing, for Simpson to be reporting from both countries with any regularity – but there will always be differences of opinion whether there is enough, too much, or too little reporting.
Yet Nyrabia’s direct challenge to those present was that there had not been protest-marches in the UK about Syria, and about the pounding of Homs, a city where people had been trapped, trying to live and to defend themselves*. The film and he claimed that the situation was unprecedented, and therefore demanded worldwide attention (at a better level, at any rate, than that of The United Nations, where failing to secure agreement within The Security Council (as it is called) can stymie any proper military or humanitarian response (although we do eventually see the latter in the film)).
Whether or not it was unprecedented since the post-war establishment of the UN is open to question, but probably the question is a red herring : what was happening was, of course, very bad by anyone’s standards, but the UN (and NATO, to whom the defenders also looked for help) has, as we all know, often enough shown itself to act erratically. Or for reasons that have subverted the notion that, as lodestones, UN member nations act solely and absolutely in support of legality and justice – let alone when a member of The Security Council interprets a Mandate to justify taking action outside the umbrella of the UN per se.
In terms of popular protest, though, it is well known that the Stop The War march in London on 15 February 2003, seeking to prevent / protest the second invasion of Iraq, did not achieve its nominal aim. Since then, London’s Parliament Square has even been cleared of legal demonstrations : in its day, if one wanted to see and understand more of issues concerning human rights, atrocity or war crime, Westminster had been the place for it. For, there, hardy souls camped out in shelters, advertising for how long they had done so (in what is conventionally called a sea of placards or faces**).
People may or may not have held similar rallies or marches about Syria, or made smaller, static protests (none of this necessarily in London), but perhaps they were not highly publicized / televised : at any rate, what the people of Syria felt (and those whom we see in Homs) was that they were being overlooked and ignored. Their frustration and anger are a current in the film – alongside defiance, taunting, pleading, and despair (to which emotions we return later).
In the Q&A, there was also strong feeling from Nyrabia that directing large, armed forces against the initially peaceful demonstrators had mistakenly (or falsely) come to be described as a civil war, whereas he asserted, with the film, that it was a government suppressing its struggling people using violence : as the film depicts it, the resistance seemed to have resorted to arms when the brutality and intensity of the repression became apparent, and not to everyone’s satisfaction (not least when the narrator sensed, with sorrow, that an element of gunlust had taken over).
It was here that the defenders of Homs saw themselves, if not in so many words, naked and alone, because of both the ferocity of the attack against which they tried to defend themselves (and, more importantly for them, the lives of those whom they loved), and of what they saw as the lack of intervention – or will to intervene – from the outside world. One is tempted to quote some words from the Gospels (though they hardly speak uniquely to this situation) :
Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee ? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee ?
And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
Matthew 25 : 34-40
(King James’ Version)
Be that as it may. Afterwards (not having been invited to pose the question in the Q&A), @THEAGENTAPSLEY asked Nyrabia if it had always been obvious that what would cement the disparate moods, which one could briefly characterize as Enthusiasm / Joy / Loss / Grief / Resignation, were Humour, Music and Poetry (the poetry is in the narrative tone and style). Largely ignoring the thrust of the question, and saying that this was just the process of editing, Nyrabia said that the film is linear***.
Yet, if so, the story did not seem as if it had sufficient contextualization and explanation. At one point, for example, a map showing Homs as a besieged enclave did not seem to specify its orientation, so it was only later that one found the city to be actually on the opposite side of the country from what one had gathered : for the convention of North being towards the top (unless shown otherwise) had not been followed, and one had no notion of what – if anything – stopped those there from making for and crossing the border as refugees (actually that between Syria and Lebanon ?)
For, if the claim is that the world has not given heed to what had happened in Syria, can a film such as Return to Homs tell it, by following a group of people, and taking for granted that everyone knows the topography / geography, or that it will simply become clear, by watching and listening to what is said [sc. reading in translation], that Khaledya and Bayada are parts or districts of Homs (as they seemed to be, and as research on the Internet, such as at http://syriamap.wordpress.com/, proves to be the case) ?
It would have assisted, if, at the beginning of the film, the relation between these places had been less unclear, which was around the time when the narration talks about what appears to have become a closed corridor between them – and when we were shown an obstruction / low-level blockade between the carriageways in each direction on a road running at right-angles to the lens. We then see some men attempting to remove blocks, to make a gap in it, until the authorities notice what they are doing, and appear on the scene.
So, a crossing-point, but one had fairly little notion between where and where, or what the significance could be, of blocking the main route between them, in real or absolute terms : one never did find out from the film what these places mean, culturally or in other terms, to each other, and for them thus to be separated. Even when, at night, a car is driven at speed, and without lights, over a crossing-point (to avoid snipers), we might assume that it is at a point on this route, but it could have been somewhere else, as this information was not apparent.
It is less material that, as the film develops, we have to come to gather that Abdul Basset Saroot, a former football goalkeeper and a charismatic protester, is the person whom the narrative is referring to right at the beginning : a documentary, after all, needs to make one work at some level, at gaining understanding, rather than simply unfolding before its intended audience – if it is to take the best of what feature films do and engage one, by the process of active viewing itself.
Basset and who he turned out to be is one matter (which starts to unfold as Abu Adnan films him), whereas getting some notion of how Homs is set out, and what the destruction that we see implies for communication within the city, is another, and the lack of detail felt detrimental to telling the story of Homs. (Film editor Martin Reymers, and the Schnittbüro (in Munich ?) were both credited, so they presumably should bear some responsibility, on the German side of the production, for how the finished film ‘reads’ in this sense.)
In that telling, we come very close to Basset, hearing him exclaim with relief Thank God I did not shoot – it was a woman !, because he had been pointing his automatic weapon through a gun-slot, or, at a time when he loses heart, I no longer have it in me to do this. His faith is integral to what he believes that he is doing by fighting back, and, when he also says that God’s greatest gift to humans is oblivion, it is with a heartfelt sense of humanity’s place before divine authority and wisdom.
Before the return of which the title talks, which is hardly seen to be without danger to all involved (not least to Nyrabia as cinematographer, who had seemed quite matter of fact in saying, by way of introduction to the screening, that others and he had risked their lives to make it), there is a tranquil moment. In a sort of rural idyll, Basset is seen relaxing with, seemingly, members of his family, some female members of whom (his sister and his mother ?) wish that they could go with him.
One who could not go was Ossama al Homsi, of whose capture (and likely torture) we learnt in the film. No one asked in the Q&A why his face had been pixellated, but, it was not, even so, probable that it had been done in order to protect him from incrimination****: so perhaps it was out of respect, religious or otherwise, for his family or friends not to show his face, protecting his memory or his spirit, rather than literally shielding him…
As to whether Basset, and what we see him undergo, makes Return to Homs cohere except on a spiritual or symbolic plane, rather than as hard fact, must be down to the individual. However, when a recent map such as at http://syriamap.wordpress.com/ indicates that there are still factions / tensions within Homs, one comes back to the question raised of the one-sidedness of what we see, though one might hope – depending on where one places reliance – that the presence of a representative of Amnesty gave some assurance.
As to the film qua film, there was momentary interest in the nature of the filming / representation at the outset, but room was never given to the only other question that wanted to explore the cinematic construction of the film (outlined above). Likewise, screen a film such as The Look of Love (2013), and the questions tend shy away from the fact that one has just watched a film, in a cinema no less, to questions about Paul Raymond’s real life. As if film is not a specific type of potentially persuasive artefact.
But forget that a film is an artefact – and what have you fallen in love with, through ignoring the medium, except what its makers want to tell you… ?
End-notes
* All of which we see in the film, with corridors punched through the buildings so that defenders could travel from one side of the city to another, despite snipers and bombardment - oddly passing through spaces in this way, which were once someone’s quiet living-room or kitchen, full of aromas…
** Although the marine reference does not obviously make sense, maybe deriving from the fanciful notion that many faces, in intimate proximity, make one large thing from many small ones, with nary a fissure…
*** Nyrabia had also ended up as a significant cinematographer for the film, because of lack of people willing to hazard trying to penetrate back into Homs. When he was asked about the ending being foregrounded at the beginning, he sought to minimize the relevance of this aspect in his overall claim that the unfolding against time is linear.
**** Since, pixellated or not (and sometimes he was not, when one actually saw the side of his face), he was named in the film, and one knew that it was he, each time, because of how the image had been processed.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
