Previous articleNext article FreeFilm SymposiumBrotherhood at times of war Reviewing the film Unwritten Letters Comment on Unwritten Letters. 2020. Max Bloching and Abd Alrahman Dukmak, directors. Distributed by The Royal Anthropological Institute.Eda Elif TibetEda Elif TibetUniversity of Bern Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreUnwritten Letters documents the story of a young Syrian man, Abd, arriving in Europe and making sense of who he is, through a collaborative autoethnography filmed by Abd Dukmak and Max Bloching. Abd is a twenty-four-year-old young man who took part in the early days of the 2011 revolution in Syria. Since his departure from Syria Abd has been longing for a day where he would stop traveling one-way routes, and gets the chance to hang his photographs on his own home’s walls. For the time being John Lennon and Kurt Cobain posters hang in his room and accompany Abd in his melancholy.The film begins with a night view in Lebanon, heavy in ambiance, the mood dark. Max, the co-director, introduces the film with his recognition of the pain of others (Sontag 2003), in his case a relatable other. He describes Abd to be someone of his own age who is similarly attracted to cinema. Max asks: “would there be a way to explore this moment of Abd’s transition together?” and the film takes us into a psychoanalytical journey, a conversation and dialogue taking place between two friends. Max further explains in his director’s statement:Abd and I met by coincidence at a bar in Beirut when I was traveling through the Middle East in Summer 2017. We quickly bonded and started playing with the idea of collaboration. Shortly after he managed to move to Italy, Abd shared with me letters he had written to Zean, a friend with whom he had shared euphoric moments protesting at Qotsia Square during the breakout of the revolution and who later died on his attempt to reach Europe. In these letters Abd tells Zean different fantastical scenarios about his and his country’s destiny. I was very touched by these letters and we eventually decided to “send them off” through a film.The collaborative film then becomes a co-creative exploration of how Abd transforms his emotional turmoil as he deals with the reality of his forced displacement. Through a process of revisiting the past to imagining possible futures, the film intends to evoke a peaceful arrival for Abd who oftentimes feels in a state of limbo.I met Max Bloching for the first time in Bristol (UK) at the RAI’s panel on knowledge transformations in 2018.1 He was in the audience and came to talk with me after hearing my presentation on the film I made with Maisa Alhafez, Ballad for Syria.2 Max mentioned how moved and inspired he was by our film and that he agreed with the core arguments I presented regarding the importance of activism in scholarship to transcend borders and hierarchies between those being filmed and filmmakers. He informed me that he had also been filming with his friend Abd for a long while, and that filming was in a collaborative manner.What Maisa Alhafez and I have in common with Abd and Max is that we are co-creating a new kind of cinema that aims for a personal yet collective autoethnography in which the camera becomes an active mediator and holder of “the light” for those stuck in the tunnel. By light I mean space. The act of filming becomes an intimate spatial co-creation that transcends all boundaries and allows for transformation to take place. As Abd builds his character over the course of this film, he acknowledges that he is not the same person he was, and this must be the case for Max as well, who can also not remain the same person as he was before. How have Max and Abd changed? This would be an interesting question to follow up with the co-directors.Although making a co-creative documentary is meaningful for reasons mentioned above, it is also quite challenging emotionally. “Loss,” “grief,” and “belonging” are not easy subjects to talk about. The filming sessions become almost like psychoanalytical encounters where two sides spend immense effort, time, and energy in the sense-making process of their internal and outer worlds. The camera becomes the mediator of a new kind of space which I often think of in terms of Homi Bhabha’s “third space” (1994); there, a lot of translation work is being done. Many languages are in the interplay: the voice of the heart, the voicing of pain and the sound of humanity, all reflected in beautiful nuances within art itself which carries the third space co-created between Abd and Max into the world.Speaking of cinematography, Unwritten Letters was made with good camera work. The still and precise imagery is mostly of dark and grey spaces. There are decisive cuts from place to place but at times there are long transitionary phases that could have been cut shorter, as story-wise they do not add much to the narrative. The film then follows Abd into the seasons, into his seasons. The film is full of the mundane, the random interactions of Abd socializing, speaking to Italians. Somehow I lose the track of the intention after ten minutes into the film; it is only after seeing the entire film that I understand that it is a true account of how intention was lost and then found.There are some really good ideas and moments in this film, particularly after forty minutes; then cinematography and imagery are at their peak. Past footage of the Syrian war is striking and placed right in front of the eye, zooming in to where one can see the images from the iris and zooming out to the cellphone—a metaphor of how violence becomes part of the mundane. And this is the area where Abd has the most trouble, as he asks:When we started to work on this project, I was asking myself: How can language still explain what is happening? What does it mean when every day you hear in the news how people of your country are dying in hundreds? Language becomes repetitive and meaningless. I felt guilty because I couldn’t feel sad anymore like before. I was asking myself whether I am still a normal human; whether I am still alive?! I needed to make move to know the answer.The scenes that had particular impact on me were: where we see Abd sleeping and the inner voice introducing the unwritten letter for the first time—“I don’t even write letters to those alive”; Abd’s original narrative repeating like the chorus of a hit song. The beautiful imagery of the moonlit ocean, accompanied by Abd’s letter-reading, is emotionally striking. “Ma baarif”—“I don’t know,” Abd keeps repeating.I identified two core narrative structures: 1) the mundane of the everyday as Abd is followed in his socializing with Italians, and in his (im)mobility, that are all accompanied by deep, philosophical thoughts; 2) inner voices of the storytellers—one of Max introducing Abd, showcasing the development and closing the chapter (storyteller 1), and the other inner voice of Abd describing his inner struggles so to portray his emotions and thoughts (storyteller 2).“Then, you arrived even more …” Max assures Abd, who struggles between the liminal spaces of the painful past and the worrying future. Abd mentions at the end of the film that what he is dreaming nowadays is that he is comfortable, that he lives in a good place with an Italian family. They are good people and they support him with the language. Abd’s next step is to find redemption between him and himself, and he needs a translation. He continues in his director’s statement:The process of making the film made me feel that my existence still has a reason, after all that happened and is still happening. I ask myself, how can you keep engaging with your own story for two years of your life? How can you be honest to yourself but also show compassion and forgiveness to your own soul? How can you smile and be hopeful even when daily life doesn’t allow you to be optimistic? Is it something that can be learned? Maybe I am still far from an answer, but I am finding better questions. After watching the footage and now the rough cut so many times, I started to find a way to go through this life and live it in a satisfactory or honest manner—at least with myself.This film is a fine example for deconstructing our privileged locations as filmmakers (not experiencing war in a first-hand account) and calls attention to how one should partner with those lacking requisite educational qualifications, appropriate institutional affiliations, or access to funding. I quote the very influential Eyal Ben-Ari as he criticizes the construction of authority in authorship: “The construction and deconstruction of authority in anthropological texts and in social life may be a mark of current practices: the incursion of literary values into anthropology may substitute a fetishizing of the author for an earlier fetishizing of a positivistic or scientistic notion of ethnography” (Ben-Ari 1999: 393).And so, over the course of two years, Max documented Abd’s daily navigation through his new environment as well as his process of revisiting his reality via the rushes in the editing room. Max further claims in his director’s statement:Working out together what our film was about, its content and form, was simultaneously an exercise in working through the experience of our “protagonist Abd” whose story was unfolding in real time. Over time the process of shooting and writing Unwritten Letters turned into a collaborative research of somewhat ritualistic character; a research not only into Abd’s experience of migration, but into the practice of shared authorship and collaboration itself. Co-directing with the protagonist was both a challenge and fortune as it forced us to question and negotiate our perceptions and our cinematic construction of “the real.”Just like bell hooks (1989), Abd reclaims and asks for a new language. He speaks of the matter of awareness, about “knowing.” Knowing how he feels, that he needs a technique to be able to deal with his emotions and that he should depart from the constant feeling of sadness which he used to find cool: “after 26 years I need a technique to deal with myself … the sadness I find it cool. I get my inspiration through the sadness, but now it is not so cool to constantly live with it. Sadness being an unborn baby.” According to Max, their film is an attempt to translate the subtlety and complexity of Abd’s experience of migration beyond truth-claiming, overly story-driven representations of refugeeness, as he states in his director’s statement: “I really believe in narratives that result from collaboration and friendship and that allow us to listen to the in-betweens. And just like it was for me, I hope Unwritten Letters will inspire to explore how ‘the real’ we live with has been written.” According to Abd, the film is also a construction of their own language as they constructed a “shared dictionary.” I couldn’t hold my tears back when Abd read his letter a final time. The young men’s attempt in using the filming experience as a healing process for Abd was meaningful; one who staged as an “active listener” and the other a “strong voice,” together they sought redemption from a state nearly like a catharsis that, in their own words, felt like a hangover after waking up.The film ends with Max’s remark, “Where is this process leading us to, what is our intent, what are we really after … I found a wonderful poem a message in a bottle out to sea with the hope it will wash up somewhere, on a shore line of the heart … A message in a bottle that the protagonist is trying to send off. Maybe that is the message this film was trying to bring all about.”Notes1. Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival: https://raifilm.org.uk2. Ballad for Syria, a musical ethnography made together with Maisa Alhafez, is a personal narrative of Maisa’s reflections on her own displacement. Our choice of concentrating on a single account was equally based on wanting to use the medium of cinema as a transformative tool. We had dialogues with Maisa throughout the film and these were also emotionally charged. Showcasing how sisterhood (as an act of solidarity) made the blurring of the boundaries and the overcoming of hierarchies between the filmmaker and the one being filmed possible was our innovative proposal and contribution to visual anthropology. Our award-winning musical documentary has been showcased in film festivals around the world numerous times and made it into visual anthropology classes and curriculums. Official website: www.balladforsyria.com.ReferencesBen-Ari, Eyal. 1999. “Colonialism, anthropology and the politics of professionalization.” In Anthropology and colonialism in Asia and Oceania, edited by Jan Van Bremen and Akitoshi Shimizu, 382–409. London: Curzon Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarBhabha, Homi. 1994. The location of culture. Milton Park, UK: Routledge.First citation in articleGoogle Scholarhooks, bell. 1989. Talking back: Thinking feminist, thinking Black. Boston: South End Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarSontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the pain of others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarEda Elif Tibet is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Geography, UniBern, leading her own research initiative, “Animating the Commons” (https://www.animatingthecommons.com/).Eda Elif Tibet[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 12, Number 3Winter 2022 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/723771 © 2022 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.