'Through Our Eyes' screening + Q&A
Entry Requirements: Over 18s only
“In 1945 Europe have said NEVER AGAIN but Syrian War has proved it to be wrong, it is like watching Srebrenica Genocide again and again unfolding in front of my eyes ” Samir Mehanovic
Documentary Paradiso Films Docs Ltd Running time: 70 minutes
In this brilliant new feature-length documentary, BAFTA award-winning director Samir Mehanovic (THE FOG OF SREBRENICA) asks a key question of our time: can humanity learn its lessons about the futility of war. At the same time he emphasises the need to welcome and accept the people fleeing from tragedy whom we call ‘refugees’.
Himself a Muslim refugee who fled to the UK from the murderous Bosnian Wars of the 1990s, Mehanovic gives us a wholly fresh and personal insight into the human catastrophe of the Syrian conflict. In sequences filmed over four years, his camera-work allows us to experience the lives of Syrian refugee families through their own eyes; and the resulting film offers vivid testimony to the tragic consequences of war. This is a candid account from a film-maker who knows what it is like to grow up in a war zone, and walk the streets of a foreign city without money or friends.
Mehanovic’s film goes well beyond ordinary documentary. It juxtaposes reflections on his own experience of claiming asylum and settling into a new country with interviews with refugees, filmed in camps, on trains, and in their new countries of exile or settlement. He makes particular use of images alongside music written and performed by refugees, to give an emotional insight that the western media often fails to convey.
Paradiso Films and the team behind IDFA award winner The Fog of Srebrenica (composer Nigel Osborne, editor Laura Carreira, Camera/Director/Producer Samir Mehanovic) have created a powerful piece of cinema, full of stories and images that will stay with you long after you have left the cinema.