"Brave documentary filmmaking" - One Day in Aleppo, directed by Ali Alibrahim, produced by Feras Fayyad
Screening Monday, April 24 at 14:15 - Capitole Fellini Tickets here
This film review is by Rachel Beacher. Rachel is a British journalist based in Lausanne.
There is brave documentary making – then, there is filming in the middle of besieged Aleppo, long after foreign journalists have left, taking great risks with your own life to capture the stories of people who might not survive until the next day's shooting.
Syrian journalist and director Ali Alibrahim presented the world premiere of his astoundingly courageous One Day In Aleppo at the Visions du Réel festival on Sunday 23 April. The documentary, which will be screened again on Monday 24 April, was filmed by around six cameramen over the course of a year, during the two periods that the city was under siege.
The purpose of the movie, Alibrahim explained in a question and answer session after Sunday's screening, was to show how people managed to survive and continue their lives even under siege, across Aleppo's 34 neighbourhoods. He chose to make the film without dialogue in order to make it accessible to everyone.
The film opens with a group of people running as bombs fall from the sky, while the cameraman stands firm and watches them flee.
Next we see a boy, perhaps aged about 11, dressed for school with a rucksack, wandering round the ruined remains of what was once a classroom.
Ordinary scenes of people going about their lives as best they can, making bread and starting a fire in the open air, are interspersed with footage of activities that must have become almost as mundane – cataloguing bodies in body bags, digging graves. There is a surprising moment when we watch three dozen well-looked-after cats being fed a hearty meal by staff from the Aleppo cattery while their city lies in tatters – later we see the same worker running for his life, cats presumably dispersed or dead.
In one of the film's happier tales, a group of children use cans of brightly-coloured paints to create murals of flowers and smiling faces on the ruins of their city.
Later, heart-wrenchingly, a rescue team attempts to extract a youth severely crushed between the upper layers of a building. In another shocking scene, a cameraman is travelling in the passenger seat of an ambulance that is shelled. Incredibly, he captures the windscreen smashing unexpectedly and the injured driver being dragged out by rescuers without breaking the shot.
Alibrahim told the audience that some characters' stories were not brought to a conclusion within the movie because three people his crew were following were known to have died, and four others could not be located. “There were many difficulties during the shooting,” he explained. “There was the shelling on a daily basis and there was constant fear with shooting this film.”
He said it was hard to use cameras that were high tech, and shoots would go on for as long as possible because the teams knew that the characters might die before they had the opportunity to return.
“The last week of shooting was when the characters started fleeing the city. If there is a character living in a certain neighbourhood, would go back and couldn't find him any more. The situation changed dramatically.”
Ground level and handheld footage is complemented by stunning general views of the city taken from a camera drone operated by Hasan Kattan.
People were willing to be filmed because they wanted their stories to be told. Frequently, defying documentary convention, they stop to look directly at the camera, as if to say, accusingly: 'you forgot us once, remember us now'.
The documentary was produced and co-edited by Feras Fayyad, director of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner for Last Men in Aleppo. One Day In Aleppo is surely destined to be an international winner too.
Photos above - courtesy Visions du Réel