”When the bombs fell, the first thing we did was run away. It was not until later that we realized we had not looked back. We were not allowed to say goodbye to our home, our memories, our photos and the life that was lived with them. We have become vacant like these spaces; our hastily packed belongings and the forgotten things haunt us.”
The civil war in Syria has thrown its people into a state of permanent insecurity. In her debut feature documentary, Syrian director Liwaa Yazji explores what it means to flee a war. The film’s nine protagonists are in constant state of alert in case they are unexpectedly forced to leave their homes. Haunted is about the Syrian people’s relationship with their homes during the war. What is a home – in a physical and in a metaphorical sense? And how do these people feel when they are forced to leave? Through the stories that she collects, Yazji captures the subtle trace of the endless refugee movements in the region during the past seventy years. The grainy images captured from Skype conversations and the deliberately imperfect shots taken with a hand-held camera add to the feel of destruction and rootlessness which have become part of the lives of the film’s protagonists.