Exiled in Paris since 2011 after criticizing Bashar el-Assad’s regime, Syrian filmmaker Ossama Mohammed continued to follow events in his country from his computer, thanks to the innumerable posts on Youtube. As a way to heal his people, he started putting together images and sounds for a symphony about a country that is suffering. Until a young Syrian woman with Kurdish roots who was still in Syria, Wiam Simav Bedirxan, contacted him to engage in dialogue by sending him her own images.

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“This is a film made up of 1001 images taken by 1001 Syrian men and women. And me”: but also and especially the pulse of life and survival, miraculously spared within the disintegration of a city and a nation. What started with a masochistic search by director Ossama Mohammed, who felt guilty for leaving and was traumatized by the video of a tortured adolescent, turned into a significant project when he was contacted by a Syrian named Simav – “silvered water” in Kurdish – who stayed in Homs. Tied together by the fate of their country but separated by thousands of kilometers, they have created a gripping portrait of a nation ripped to pieces. Brutal and poetic, the film leads through the rubble of the city, the chaos of explosions and the absence of voices, of individuality and universality, in an attempt to recreate with film a country reduced to dust. Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait is distressing and, most of all, an important work.