Time, grief, and hope on film

Abstract

There is an intangible feeling of time passing that film captures, both when filming and in the edit. In documentary, with real people’s lives, we capture moments, feelings, sounds. A random thing that someone did or said. You catch their love of language, their poetry, the beauty or tension of a moment of life. As a filmmaker you hold onto these precious moments, you rewatch them, listen to them multiple times, and handle them with a lot of care and attention. After all, it is these fragile moments that make up your film. In Unwritten Letters, directed by Max Bloching and Abd Alrahman Dukmak, Abd, the main protagonist, tells Max “I want to see ‘my film’ in this film.” Abd is a twenty-four-year-old Syrian, who took part in the early days of the 2011 revolution and now lives in Padua, Italy. Together with his friend Max they make a film. As they are exploring how to turnAbd’s reality in Italy into a film, Abd is revisiting his past and diving into possible futures. Unwritten Letters documents the story of a young Syrian man arriving in Europe and his process in making sense of who he is through film and friendship. This is a film of fragments, of time moving slowly. It also incorporates the process of editing within the film, revealing the tensions of making sense of the fragments of footage. Max had met Abd in Beirut and as their friendship grew so did the idea of working on a film. For Abd the process of working on this film was an opportunity to come to terms with some of his recent experiences of leaving Syria, of losing dear friends, of moving to Italy to start a new life. He shared with Max letters he