Khaled Abdulwahed

Made from images filmed by the Syrian artist Amel Alzakout after the boat on which she was fleeing Syria sank off the coast of Lesbos, Purple Sea reports on the moment in which the co-director and the other passengers are floating in the sea in their lifejackets, waiting to be rescued. Her voice-over accompanies this extremely poignant experience.

The experimental short film deconstructs and reconstructs copies of the photograph of a Syrian cactus field projected on a wall in a flat in a Berlin backyard. In autumn 1998, near his home in the southwest of Damascus, Khaled Abdulwahed took a landscape photograph of a cactus field on a 35mm chrome film. The old cactus fields in that area link the city with the countryside. Cacti grow all over the Middle East and are used for their fruits and as borders between houses and villages. The thorny, tough plant is also a symbol of resilience. The cactus field in Khaled’s film “backyard” consisted of 500,000 square-yards that belonged to farmers, who used to sell their cacP fruits every summer in the streets of Damascus. In the summer of 2012, the cactus fields were destroyed during the uprising, and the war started to form a new landscape. Khaled's picture on the film was damaged and lost, but he still had a scan of the photography-film.

A conversation between the filmmaker and his father, separated by the war in Syria. Now a refugee in Germany, the son reconstructs the journey of his father, who was a student there 70 years earlier.

In Slot in Memory, a 2013 short from Syrian filmmaker Khaled Abdulwahed, images of war are only visible through a tiny crack in an otherwise dark frame. Abdulwahed cuts between this crack and simple footage of children from Lebanon’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps playing happily on a swing. Abdulwahed has said he had initially set out to tell a more direct account of war and trauma, but because he was physically unable to reach warzones inside Syria, he felt he couldn’t do such a project justice. Instead, filming the kids, he discovered the swing they were playing on had a crack in it, which inspired him to make the visual connection with the obscured war footage.