Damascus Dreams

Canada202183 minArabic, French, English with English subtitlesDocumentary, Experimental

Directed by Émilie Serri, Damascus Dreams is a reflexive documentary essay presented in a series of sections framed by voiceovers of Serri and her father. The film explores and interrogates the fraught notions of dreams, and memories of “home,” moving loosely through old video footage of the family home in Syria, interviews with Syrians who had to leave or flee because of the civil war, conversations between Serri and her father, and poetic, dreamlike sequences. Serri gathers these stories and memories to hold against her own questions about a homeland she does not have access to—and one her father cannot return to. 

To dream of home in Damascus Dreams is to grapple with grief. These collected reflections on yearning and loss become assemblage, a mingled presentation of impressions and emotions from a community with connections to a shared homeland, who express vastly different relationships to their experiences and memories. 

- Jasmine Gui