ISTHMUS

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ISTHMUS

By Lina SINJAB

SINJAB - as PROD

Social issues - Production 2023

Two friends separated by war struggle with being exiled at home and abroad. Twelve years on Syria’s uprising, renowned novelist Khaled Khalife tries to go on with life at warn torn city Damascus while most of his friends left. As he holds on to home, I lost ties with it.

- Year of production
- 2023
- Genres
- Social issues, Female director, Documentary
- Countries
- SYRIA
- Languages
- ARABIC
- Budget
- N/A
- Duration
- 90 mn
- Director(s)
- Lina SINJAB
- Producer(s)
- Lina SINJAB, Victor EDE (CINEPHAGE)
- Synopsis
- Like many of her peers, Lina Sinjab left Damascus in the mid- 2013’s as the Syrian civil war and constant security threats and imprisonment by regime made life intolerable for this award-winning correspondent whose conflict reporting earned her threats and detention. Her friend of 20 years, the internationally celebrated author Khaled Khalifa, stayed put. ISTHMUS, a documentary feature, records the urgent conversation between Lina and Khaled about the city they love. Lina thinks present day Damascus has little in common with the city she once knew; Khaled insists that Damascene culture endures. “Denial” Lina thinks, though she understands Khaled’s reasons for embracing such a fiction.
  Khaled both soothes and nourishes his anger in writing and painting. Known as a critic of the regime but not one of its targets, he is at work on a new novel though progress is halting. At night, during her visit, he cooks aubergine that no one comes to eat and drives Lina through the darkened, empty streets of Damascus, talking and improvising songs and poems.
  A few friends remain in the city. Boulos is one of them. He’s renovating a traditional house in old Damascus for a cultural center inspired by the city’s former artistic and intellectual energy. Lina and Khaled visit cafés where poetry, debate, entertainment and joy once filled the air. These places are now empty or closed. At times, they journey into the past through photos and videos and memories. Stories and dialogue (read by the author) from Khaled’s most recent novel, “Death is a Hard Work,” provide access to the desperate and depleted present.
  In the city beyond Khaled’s window, wealthy new elites patronize luxurious new boutiques, while displaced families wander the streets, roofless and futureless. Looking out upon Damascus, Khaled struggles with a new novel. As he shares excerpts of it by phone with Lina, who is newly on the wanted list in Syria, unfamiliar stories emerge. Where do these people and scenes come from, Lina wonders? The city as it is, or from Khaled’s memory and imagination?