In the spring of 2022, the Ukrainian city of Mariupol was surrounded by Russian troops. They were using the weapons of mass destruction against the civilian population every day. In mid-March volunteers started evacuating people from Mariupol to Zaporizhzhia. They gathered after each trip to exchange the information, support each other, and talk about their traumatic experiences.
The film portrays a different dimension of the political uprising which happened in the north of Iraq(Kurdistan) in 1991, the political movement led to separate the Kurdish region from Iraq and liberation from the former Iraqi regime. The film contains the idea that the revenge mentality can be avoided under any circumstances despite a long-term dictatorial era.
In Slot in Memory, a 2013 short from Syrian filmmaker Khaled Abdulwahed, images of war are only visible through a tiny crack in an otherwise dark frame. Abdulwahed cuts between this crack and simple footage of children from Lebanon’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps playing happily on a swing. Abdulwahed has said he had initially set out to tell a more direct account of war and trauma, but because he was physically unable to reach warzones inside Syria, he felt he couldn’t do such a project justice. Instead, filming the kids, he discovered the swing they were playing on had a crack in it, which inspired him to make the visual connection with the obscured war footage.
