A Syrian Love Story is one of the most powerful documentary films I have seen. Not only it is a very good documentary for many reasons, but given the current social and political context, it couldn’t be any more timely. The documentary was filmed over five years, starting in 2009 and ending in 2015. During this period, we see the drastic impact of the Syrian situation through the journey in exile of a family of five: Amer, Raghda and their three sons.
Amer and Raghda are two revolutionaries, the former being a Palestinian freedom fighter and the latter being an opponent to Al Assad’s regime. They meet in prison in a quite romantic way: he sees her through a hole in the cell’s wall when she’s all bruised from the beatings of the guards. In the next months they fall in love and go to live together in Damascus. They have three sons. Raghda writes a book about their story in which she criticises the regime of the Syrian dictatorship and she gets arrested for it. This is the point in which director Sean McAllister meets his husband Amer.
When we first meet Amer, he’s all devastated. His love for her is genuine; as he himself puts it “I love her more than anybody can love someone”. His impotence to get her out of the prison has him depressed, being the only light in the house their charismatic youngest son Bob, who must be about four years old. It’s only with the beginning of the Arab spring movements in 2011 when Assad’s regime, under international pressure, starts releasing some political prisoners. Luckily, Raghda is one of them.
When Raghda comes back home to her family she doesn’t smile much, except for when she’s embracing Bob. The weary experience of the time spent in prison has marked her expression, she feels absent, as she herself tells Sean.
At this point Sean gets arrested for a short period of time, and the regime’s thugs take his camera, causing him to lose a good deal of the documentary’s footage. Under this circumstance, the family is forced to flee the country, and they go to Lebanon. There, life is not easy for them. While Amer is happy to have their family back together, Raghda feels as a traitor of the revolution for hiding and not being fighting in Syria. She says she feels like a loser, and that her current situation is slightly to no better than being imprisoned. Amer’s idea is to leave and try to find asylum in Europe. They argue about this and Amer tells Raghda “you can’t be Che Guevara and a mother, you need to choose”. Raghda then decides to go back to Syiria, thinking the Arab Spring is a good occasion to overthrow Al Assad’s regime.
Raghda is away for a year, during which period Amer is absolutely devastated. He can’t understand how she can put her political conscience before her family; he feels as thou she has abandoned them.
The situation in Syria worsens and Raghda finally gets a passport to leave the country. She reunites with her family and they go to France, where they are granted political asylum as refugees. In France they are safe; the state gives them all kinds of aid and their children can go to school. However, there is a rising tension between the couple for Amer has never forgiven her for leaving them back in Lebanon, and he feels as if thou he loves her deeply, his love is not corresponded. Clearly, for Amer having the family together and being able to offer their children a future is good enough, while for Raghda being a refugee is essentially being a loser. Amer starts frequenting a lover as their relationship falls apart. The kids are caught into this ambient of rivalry, while Sean starts playing a role of “bad marriage counsellor” as he puts it.
Finally they divorce; Amer moves with his children to the countryside somewhere in the south of France and Raghda goes to work as an advisor for the opposition party in Turkey. This is a sense a happy ending, for each of them finds a path more according to their life expectations. During the film we also see the kids growing up and telling their vision of it all. As Sean himself points out “the resilience of the children is incredible”; despite all the traumatic episodes, they still manage to adapt to new circumstances and keep smiling. From the very beginning, one gets the impression that rather than a properly budgeted and planned documentary, we are watching the journey of a man equipped only with his camera and his will to tell a real story without decorations. I find the lack of concern for superfluous matters such as aesthetics, well curated image and sound, an essential feature of this film.
At the long Q&A that took place after the screening in Goldsmiths University, the director was able to give his thoughts and details about the course of the documentary. He explained how, given that his film never got commissioned until he finished shooting the (more than two hundred hours of) footage, neither him nor the family knew if it would ever get to see the light of day. The fact that they ‘don’t take it too seriously’ makes them not worry about the camera, which becomes nothing but an extension of Sean, to whom they speak very openly.
Now that the film is finished and doing very good in festivals and on television –McAllister proudly announced that A Syrian Love Story was the first film ever to be upgraded from BBC4 to BBC1 without any changes-, Amer, who has been accompanying the director to screenings all over Europe, has come to appreciate the importance of telling his story.
The power of this documentary lays in its humanity: a political struggle explained through probably the most universal language, love. It is by telling a ‘love story’ that the director Sean McAllister achieves to appeal to the public’s heart, rather than its brain. Love, not as the cheesy Hollywood conceptualization of it, but love as the beautiful yet tragic bond that unites the story of two individuals. Although the context of the film is intrinsically political, the director has achieved in reducing the political issues to the background, thus making the public not think with pre-packed ideology, but rather emotionally empathizing with the characters. The close relationship the director establishes with the characters is very appealling. This results in a very intimate portrait of the family, but one that is not awkwardly intrusive.
Even if this very notion of having to realize that they are human too is quite embarrassing, in a time where the media depicts the horrors happening in Syria and the fleeing refugees in such a dehumanized way, this document is of capital importance. It teaches us that no matter the place of origin, all human lives matter, because we all feel and suffer in the same way.