‘Our Terrible Country’ Screening

Bidayyat for Audiovisual Arts presents Our Terrible Country (2014, 85 minutes, Syria/Lebanon), a film by Mohammad Ali Atassi and Ziad Homsi.

The movie portrays the perilous journey of well-known intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh and young photographer Ziad Homsi through war torn Syria. After 16 years in prison for belonging to the Syrian left, Yassin (53) joins Syria’s popular uprising in 2011. Ziad (24), occasionally fighting with the rebels, takes photographs of his hometown Douma. The two men meet and become friends in this Damascene suburb where Yassin and his wife Samira had found shelter.

Together, they embark on an adventurous journey through the desert to al-Haj Saleh’s native town Raqqa in Northeast Syria, now occupied by the “Islamic State in Iraq and Levant” (ISIS), which also kidnapped two of Yassin’s brothers.