My Memory Is Full of Ghosts review – deeply moving visual hymn for the bombed-out Syrian city of Homs

Anas Zawahri’s documentary lays heart-wrenching testimony over languorous shots of bullet-ridden ruins and deserted streets The western Syrian city of Homs is only a husk of its former self. Previously a major industrial centre, the region became a key battleground between 2011 and 2014, for Bashar al-Assad’s army and rebel forces. Amid the immense bloodshed, hundreds of thousands of civilians were either displaced or trapped inside their own homes. Filmed in the summer of 2023, this deeply moving documentary from Palestinian-born and Syria-based film-maker Anas Zawahri maps out the collective trauma and sorrow that continue to linger, even after the shooting has stopped. Unfolding in languorous, largely static shots of bombed rubble, hollowed-out buildings, and deserted streets, the film lays bare the startling extent of wartime brutality. A sense of stillness and stagnancy hangs in the air, and almost every wall is riddled with bullet holes, urban scars that mirror the psychological ...

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt review – experimental film pulls on the senses

Sundance film festival: Raven Jackson’s gorgeous, sparsely worded debut film evokes the non-linear memories of one Black woman in Mississippi

There will be a moment in All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, the gorgeous, unconventional debut from Raven Jackson, when the film’s spell works. It may be in the first 15 minutes, lulled by Mississippi’s lush soundscape and meditative shots of a southern summer, or an extended take in a hospital delivery room. It could wait until the final scene, an ode to memories already recorded and yet to come.

The pull of this sparsely worded, deeply sensitive film will probably depend on what triggers one’s personal sentimentality and, more pertinently, how much you know about it going in. The plot is so loosely outlined, and the camera so frequently turned to hands over faces, that it could be difficult, sans context, to pick up on its ambitious logic: a series of non-chronological memories in the life of one Black woman, connected by the senses of touch and sound and particularly attuned to the lingering feel of one’s skin on another.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt premiered at the Sundance film festival and will be released later this year

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