Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Liwaa Yazji’s debut film “Haunted” (Maskun, 2014) documents the process through which a number of Syrians in midst of a war zone make the agonizing decision to leave their homes and go into exile. While the specific locations and some of the names of the participants in the film are not provided, the film incorporates conventional one-on-one interviews, Skype chats, and various types of footage of urban environments and residential interiors that have been destroyed through the ongoing warfare. Noticeably, as they contemplate leaving their homes for an uncertain and precarious future outside of Syria, the participants in the film appear to avoid taking political sides in the current conflict even while they deal with the day-to-day stresses and pressures of living in a war zone. Their focus, instead, is on whether or not they will be able to leave and on contemplating what it means to leave almost everything they know or own behind. Drawing on the Abounaddara film group’s concept of “emergency cinema” and its insistence on the “right to an image” as a fundamental human right, this paper investigates how the two concepts of home and exile are articulated and intertwined in the film in terms of both form and content. As will be shown, through its emphasis on depicting the visual aftermath of destruction and violence alongside the individual story lines of the survivors and soon to be displaced of war, “Haunted,” constructs a series of literal and figural border zones. Shaded with ambivalence in both visual and narrative terms, these border zones force the audience to contemplate the shifting meaning of home and exile, not just for the film’s participants, but for themselves.