عمر أميرالاي: الحزن والوقت والصمت
by Hala Alabdalla
Syria, France, 2021
ملخص
After joining the May 1968 protests as a film student in Paris, Omar Amiralay returned to his native Syria to start making documentaries critical of the Ba’ath regime (which banned Amiralay’s work for most of his life). A dozen years his junior, Hala Alabdalla was a teenager active in leftist organizations who attended the Damascus Ciné-Club for the long post-screening discussions. (Alabdalla recalls the special guests Amiralay and other organizers would bring in, such as Jean Genet.) Over a decade in the making, Alabdalla’s moving posthumous portrait of Amiralay is rooted in three decades of friendship and shared revolutionary fervor. Largely filmed on a visit to Damascus in 2009, Omar Amiralay: Sorrow, Time and Silence alternately has the feeling of a private conversation and a masterclass on political cinema. The pair talk about their craft and their enduring belief in film as a tool for action; about old age and Amiralay’s ailing mother. Unhurried and melancholic, Alabdalla’s film is haunted by Amiralay’s sudden death in 2011, five weeks before the Syrian revolution.
عن صناع الفيلم
Hala Alabdalla is a Syrian filmmaker and producer whose work moves between France and the Middle East, where she has been based since 1981. Trained in film and audiovisual studies at the University of Paris, she also holds a degree in the anthropology of the Arab world from the EHESS.
Across her career, she has collaborated closely with Arab and French filmmakers while developing her own body of documentary work. Her films are shaped by a strong political and humanistic commitment, often reflecting on memory, exile, and the lived realities of the Arab world.
Her internationally recognised documentary I Am the One Who Brings Flowers to Her Grave (2006) marked a historic moment as the first Syrian film to be presented and awarded at the Venice Film Festival.
Alongside her filmmaking, Alabdalla has served on juries at major festivals including Venice, FID Marseille, and Visions du Réel, and has been actively involved in mentoring and training emerging filmmakers. In 2017, she founded Savoir, Voir, Revoir, a filmmaking and training laboratory for young Syrian refugees in Europe, supported by the CNC.
Omar Amiralay: Pain, Time and Silence is her fifth feature-length documentary.
