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

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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 ...
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The Wire review – locals deal with razor-sharp border fence in migrant study

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Documentary sheds light on responses to a fence designed to keep migrants of the EU Schengen area, a dizzyingly complex issue

Endless newsreel and column inches have been devoted to Europe’s migrant crisis over the past decade, and we are no nearer to getting to grips with the problem. This documentary by Croatian director Tiha Gudac opens up a fresh perspective by focusing principally on the effects on destination or transit countries: namely a beautifully sylvan stretch of the Croat-Slovenian border demarcated by the Kupa River and, now, horrible lengths of coiled razor wire laid down by the EU to prevent migrants from breaching the Schengen area.

The border fence sullies farmland and forests, complicates river tourism and separates Croatian and Slovenian communities who have ties going back centuries. The Balkan region is one with particular sensitivity to artificial segregation, and the local people tentatively fight back: early on, we see Croats and Slovenians joining up for a cross-border fun run. For those with long memories, this grim palisade, and the inhumane rejection of non-Europeans it implies, chimes with wartime fascism. But not everyone sees it that way: one father, mother and daughter spend their family time crawling under the wire to scope out points on the frontier where interlopers might be hiding.

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