This screening is supported by CEC Arts Link and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School, in conjunction with the exhibition and conference Abounaddara. The Right to the Image, presented at Parsons from October 22 through November 11, 2015.
“When the bombs fell, the first thing we did was run away. It was not until later that we realized we had not looked back. We were not allowed to say goodbye to our home, our memories, our photos and the life that was lived within them. We have become vacant like these spaces; our hastily packed belongings and the forgotten things haunt us.”
An uncertain existence followed the escape and expulsion from Syria that tumbled into a physical and mental nowhere, a non-space between yesterday and tomorrow. Haunted tells of the loss of home and security, of the the meanings that a home has in one’s life.
Haunted received a Special Mention Prize for a First Film at FID Marseille, 2014.
Awarded a Special Mention in (FID Marseille’s) First Film category, Yazji’s film is harrowing but affectionate, struggling to maintain contact on those who remain in their homes amid bombings, depletion of supplies, and mounting and uncertainty and dread. Through Skype conversations and owner-led tours of damaged homes, the film constructs an almost metonymic nostalgia for a lost homeland, invested in devastated apartments and salvaged heirlooms.
Liwaa Yazji was born in Moscow in 1977. She is a graduate of Theater Studies in Damascus/Syria and worked in the fields of theater dramaturgy, playwriting, and screen writing. She acted in Abdullatif Abulhamid’s September Rain (Syria 2009) and was assistant director of Allyth Hajjo and Ammar Alani’s docudrama Windows of the Soul (Syria 2011). In 2012, she published her first play “Here in the Garden” and is currently preparing the second one with the Royal Court. In 2014, her poetry book Peacefully, we leave home was published in Beirut. She wrote the screen play for the TV drama series The Brothers (2013) which was broadcast on Abu Dhabi TV, CBC Egypt, and LBC Lebanon. Haunted (Syria/Germany 2014) is Liwaa’s directorial debut.
