2023-06-20 19:33:15
Nezouh **
de Soudade Kaadan
film british-syria, 1 h 43
Stay or go? In a devastated district of Damascus where the army will soon arrive, Motaz has decided: his wife Hala, his 14-year-old daughter Zeina and he will not leave their apartment, in which they have invested all their savings. To justify his radical choice, he promises them that they will lack nothing. There is no more water or electricity in the building? The food reserves are empty? He tinkers with a generator, takes bottles and cans from lodgings abandoned by neighbors. When a bombardment tears through the facade and holes in the ceilings of their apartment on the top floor, Motaz claims to be able to repair everything: “Give me two days and everything will be settled. »
Soudade Kaadan invites us to take another look at the Syrians caught in the turmoil of war: neither victims nor heroes, they look like us. To create this mirror effect, she focuses on a family before its members became refugees, a fate that Motaz denies above all else. The filmmaker dismisses the documentary presentation to go towards comedy and poetry without ceasing to speak of the conflict in a film which reconciles realism and fable. The stubbornness of Motaz, his sovereign denial and his proclamation of a return to normal once simple sheets nailed to the gaps in the walls make people smile despite the tragic context. The essential would be preserved: his wife and daughter are hidden from view.
A breach in the patriarchal edifice
In a short column, Soudade Kaadan also evokes the way in which war transforms the members of a family and their relationships. Faced with the madness of Motaz, Hala and Zeina find the path to their emancipation. More than to the father, it is to the daughter that the story is attached. A large hole in the ceiling of her bedroom allows the teenager to escape through the imagination while contemplating the stars from her bed. When Amer, the son of the only other family left in their street, emerges from this limpid sky, they forget together on the roof terrace the field of ruins at their feet.
Through her elegant and luminous staging, punctuated with pretty visual finds, the director tenderly recounts the small world they create far from the din of war and the madness of humans. If the film loses a bit of its force by leaving the cocoon that has remained against all odds in the family apartment, the exodus («nezouh») delicately draws the possibility of a future for Zeina and her family.
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