Documentary
نور وظلال
Omar Amiralay · 1994
Synopsis
Lumière et ombres: Nazih Shahbandar, a very old gentleman of Damascus, receives at home those who come to question him. With his own hands he built a camera, a system for recording sound on film, a printer, a developing table, and set up a studio in Bab Touma. He tells his story, shows what remains to him, explains what he had dreamed of achieving. Around him are a city and a trade that ask nothing more of him, and filmmakers who wonder, as they film him, what awaits them.
Context
Forty-two minutes shot for the centenary of cinema, in a series of documentaries that three filmmakers had set themselves as a task, under the name of the ten commandments, in order to dust off figures the country had left aside. The title takes up that of the first Syrian talkie, from 1948, changing one letter: darkness becomes shadows. Between homage and lament, the fate of a neglected pioneer serves there as a mirror of the state of Syrian cinema at the end of the century, as its authors see it.
Who it is for
Forty-two minutes in colour, in Arabic with French subtitles. It is important to know that nothing of the 1948 film in question will be seen, since nothing of it remains.
Prizes and reception
First film in a joint project by three filmmakers to rescue figures of Syrian culture from oblivion; shown again in 2008 at the Damascus documentary days.