Nondesertion

Introducing a real labor of love and pain, a popular cut of my fourth documentary short “Nondesertion.” The film is a meditative collage poem on shattering revolutionary dreams, shrinking horizons, and displacement in Syria. It’s a love letter to the memory of censored images, lost images, and poor images: weapons in the arsenal of any revolutionary. Along with the film is an interview I conducted with a personal hero, Hala Alabdullah, whose first film “I Am the One Who Brings the Flowers to Her Grave” introduces and bookends Nondesertion. Hala’s work, along with her peer and mentor, the giant of Arab documentary cinema Omar Amiralay, serves as a personal inspiration on the level of form, politics, and poetics.