Safar: Houses Without Doors + Q&A

We are offering a special multibuy deal for the Safar Film Festival: book tickets for three or more individual films and get them for £9 each

A Q&A with curator Rasha Salti, writer Malu Halasa and director Avo Kaprealian follows the screening.

From the balcony of his family’s apartment in Aleppo’s Midan district, Avo Kapraelian began to chronicle scenes of everyday street life that captured a sense of foreboding and fears that the violent conflict inflaming the country was fast approaching. Once in a while, the father breaks his silence to reprimand his son for endangering the entire family. In contrast, the mother avails herself to the camera, recounting events, divulging emotion, without reserve.

Midan’s residents are predominantly descendant of the Armenian genocide survivors who fled homes in Turkey and settled in Aleppo. As the armed conflict hit their street, Kapraelian’s lens turns inward to record the family’s quotidian of coping with shelling, snipers and power cuts. For Armenian-Syrians, whose memory is deeply etched with the tragedy of forced exile, the prospect of leaving their homes and lives to escape death, echoes an ancestral trauma.

Houses Without Doors (Manazil Bela Abwab), dir. Avo Kaprealian, Syria/Lebanon 2016, 90 mins. Arabic and Armenian with English subtitles.