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 One of them, "Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait", shown at
the Cannes Film Festival last year, was pieced together by
exiled Syrian filmmaker Ossama Mohammed from YouTube videos. It
shows people being shot and bleeding to death, not surprising in
a film about a civil war.
By contrast, the documentary "Our Terrible Country", filmed in
Syria and shown at this week's "!F" festival in Istanbul, has
just one violent scene -- a shootout between rebels and snipers
loyal to the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
"No blood, no torture -- that was deliberate," Ziad Homsi, a
rebel-turned filmmaker who made the movie with co-director
Mohammad Ali Atassi, said as he walked near Istanbul's Taksim
Square.
"As Syrian people, we have been humiliated enough. Just look at
the destruction, and that will make you ask about those who once
who lived here."
Instead, "Our Terrible Country" is an almost philosophical
attempt to answer the question: "What has become of our native
land?"
"Is it possible that lot came because of us?" Homsi, 25, says in
the film. He was referring to the Islamist insurgents who have
taken over large parts of Syria and neighboring Iraq during
years of fighting between Assad's forces and rebels trying to
overthrow him, in a civil war that has killed 200,000 people.
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Shot in 2013, the film depicts the soul-searching that Homsi and his
travel companion, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, a Syrian dissident and
writer, during a 19-day journey to Raqqa, Saleh's hometown. They
traveled in extreme heat -- and in constant fear of being targeted
by various Islamist groups.
"The Syria we want won't emerge under these people. They’re
destroying Syria, just like the regime," Homsi says in the film.
As the film draws to a close, the two sit at a restaurant in
Istanbul, and talk of their yearning for families trapped in Syria.
They question the revolution and where they belong and are dismayed
about their fading chances of returning.
"Even though it resembles a slaughterhouse today, this is our
country and we have no other. And I know that no country will be
kinder to us than this terrible country," Saleh says.
(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk; Editing by Ayla Jean Yackley, Michael
Roddy and Larry King)
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