Ammar al-Beik

A parable on the Syrian present by mixing footage of the protests in Syria and a circus performance that involves a lion and goes awry with a nod to Fellini’s cinema.

Interviews with three Syrian women who live in exile.

Bissan, a girl from Jerusalem, who has no-one left in her life except her old grandma, lives in an old house that used to belong to her ancestors, next to the graveyard where all her family members are buried. Bissan starts to walk inside the cemetery, passing by some surrounding hills and heading towards an undetermined end.

Germany, September 2014. A Syrian refugee camp has opened on the outskirts of Berlin. Visual artist and filmmaker Ammar al-Beik has a cubicle assigned to him for seven months and, in order to survive here, he has to film, document, and rebel against the conditions of life in exile, and also against the established rules of documentaries and features. His phone camera is always switched on; he transforms his tiny room and the entire dismal compound into a universe with its own laws.

Director al-Beik's first film, shot in Damascus in 1995 at a flour mill next to his mother’s house.

The life of a young family as it is interwoven with the stories of the past year; of protests, change, revolutions and martyrs. The birth of a baby, the death of a child who became iconic: hope and misery are closely linked.

Created around a taped interview with the artist Samia Halaby, director Al-Beik includes Halaby's own footage of a trip to the West Bank, in which she narrates her stay there and later documents a trip to her grandmother's apartment in Jerusalem. This is interwoven with Al Beik's own sequences exploring the modern Palestinian condition.

Aspirin and a Bullet (2011) is the first feature film by Syrian multimedia artist Ammar Al-Beik. The 2-hour autobiographical black and white film follows the conversations and confessions of those souls close to Ammar; mother, brother, lovers.

In this contemplative homage to an important part of Damascene industrial history, the filmmaker revives the old steam engine plant of Damascus, once a symbol of optimistic belief in development, but now a deserted and desolate place.