“Venice festival premiere for Syrian war film on the death of hope”, Le Monde diplomatique
Sabah Haider, Paris, August 2018 edition
A low-budget, first-feature, indie film by a woman director from Damascus, made in exile in Beirut, will premiere at the Venice Festival on 3 September. The Day I Lost My Shadow, written and directed by Soudade Kaadan, is the first Syrian film selected for the official competition of the world-renowned film festival. Her sister Amira Kaadan produced it.
Syria’s refugee crisis, stemming from the war that began in 2011, remains unabated. The film’s entirely Syrian cast is a reflection of this; they come from a variety of places that are now home to the geographically disconnected Syrian diaspora — Germany, France, refugee camps in Lebanon, and inside Syria — to be in the film.
The film, shot in 2017, mostly on the Lebanese-Syrian border, is set in Damascus in 2012. Soudade Kaadan describes it as the story of a single mother of an 8-year-old child, who is not political, just trying to get by, and runs out of fuel to cook and heat her home. Fuel is only available in a besieged area, and when she goes there, she discovers that people are losing their shadows in a war.
Although Kaadan’s origins as a filmmaker are anchored in documentary, her fiction work plays with allegory and intersects fantasy and realism. Her earlier work of fiction is Besieged Bread(2016), a short film about a Syrian woman who smuggles bread to a besieged area, finding shelter in a tree, and a man who abandons the army. Kaadan’s documentary films have been produced for Al Jazeera Documentary Channel, UNDP, UNHCR and UNICEF and have screened internationally, as has her 2017 documentary film Obscure, about a Syrian child who doesn’t want to remember that he is Syrian.
Soudade Kaadan spoke to Le Monde diplomatique’s English edition from Paris, where she was finishing post-production on the film in time for the premiere. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What inspired you to write this story?
I was in Damascus in 2011 … and even though I had made films before, when the war started I felt I couldn’t make films and I didn’t feel cinema could capture the conflict. I was trying to see how one could express massacre and horrors, how one can tell these things in cinema. Then I saw a photo of Hiroshima that really affected me. It was shot in the days after the bomb was dropped. Only shadows were left on the ground where people had burned. I felt that in a civil war it’s different, because people are living that war — you as a person remain, but your shadow is gone. This is more difficult and more painful because you are still living the experience.
How is your shadow a symbol?
I felt I couldn’t represent the reality of war realistically … only through a fantastic image — by losing a shadow. To represent a war, either you show heads cut off and torture or massacre, or you show it through the symbol of a shadow, because every human has a shadow.
What made you seek exile in Beirut?
I couldn’t continue watching the other side of Damascus being bombed and burned. I could see the war … just a 20-minute walk from my house the neighbourhood was completely destroyed. I couldn’t stop the war, and I couldn’t witness people dying every day … most people were leaving … some were imprisoned, others had disappeared; I was the last of my friends to leave. I started writing the script in Damascus, which is where I got the first development finance … I didn’t want to leave until I had the first good version of the script.
You arrived in Beirut with your script. How did you go about making the film?
In Lebanon my sister and I created a production company … this experience was very hard for us, because when there is a war and you leave your country and your community, you also lose your network and local infrastructure and industry, and all the people who believe in you as a filmmaker. You lose your shooting locations; you lose your whole community. You find yourself in a new city and a new country, and when you are a first-time filmmaker, who will take a risk on you? We had to start from zero.
What was your experience of shooting?
We had to find locations that looked and felt like Syria; that’s why we had scenes shot in many locations. However, most of the film was shot on the Syrian border: five days in Beirut, 17 days on the border.
Your cast came from all over the Syrian diaspora. This is a powerful and moving characteristic of this film. How did you do the casting?
The casting process was really long because I only wanted Syrian actors … most of them were scattered … I was casting on Skype, with actors in Berlin, in France, in Syria, and in Lebanon. The main actress, in France, had asked for asylum, and getting a visa to return to Beirut to shoot a film was hard because once you ask for asylum, you can’t just go back. We were risking everything because she only got the visa two days before the shoot, and we had one day for rehearsal. So we were shooting and rehearsing at the same time on set, and that was a lot of work.
Did the four main actors know each other in Syria?
Yes … and this film was the first time they reconnected after they left. It brought them together again … But now they were coming from different countries.
Many of them had probably not seen Syria since they left. They had to look at their country in civil war, from their new homes.
It was an emotional shoot because the war is still here and the pain is still here; the leading actress said she felt older because she had to experience the war again … It was emotional because everyone wanted to tell the story but hadn’t had the opportunity until then.
How did their experiences of exile change them?
It informed their believable and beautiful acting.
You cast additional characters from refugee camps?
I decided to cast from the camps because as a Syrian in Lebanon I wanted to represent my community in the film. I felt I could try to make this film a happy and emotional experience for everyone. I know how art and films can have a therapeutic role, and I needed these additional characters and they needed me. After a lot of shots, they started crying, I would ask them why and they would say they lost someone, and that the scene had reminded them of that moment. The kid in the film was from a camp, and he was in a bad situation … I wanted to help him. We spent a lot of time together and at the end he said it was a beautiful experience … I saw how much he changed … At the end he was confident and happy, because he got confidence, hope and happiness from being in this film. He even improved his social skills … It’s all about how you tell the story, and it’s important to ask, is telling the story helping? That’s my background as a documentary filmmaker. I need to feel it can change things on a personal level … we can ask how we can affect people.
Your sister produced the film, which is unusual. Why did you decide to make it together?
We started the journey together; we moved together from Syria to Lebanon. I feel lucky because it has been a long struggle to make a film in a different country through a coproduction. That happened because only my sister could believe so much in me, and in this story, in a such a selfless way.