09/09/2021 - VENICE 2021: Diana El Jeiroudi’s documentary depicts Syria’s human and societal tragedies, spanning 12 years of her life spent with partner and IDFA director Orwa Nyrabia

Screened as one of the out-of-competition titles at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Diana El Jeiroudi’s Republic of Silence [+see also:
trailer
film profile] is a documentary that has been in the making for 12 years. The feature, also produced by the helmer’s partner, and IDFA director, Orwa Nyrabia, attempts to capture a human and societal tragedy by following a deliberately fragmentary narrative approach. The whole piece seems like a sort of long video diary, or a mosaic of moments, memories, photos and archive footage, starting from the day on which El Jeiroudi, then aged seven, receives a camera as a gift from her father.

Many of these fragmentary glimpses are separated from one another by intertitles. At times, these just reveal the director’s feelings or thoughts, while at others, they disclose unfilmed dialogues or loose contextual information. Republic of Silence is the story of a collapse, dominated by a profound sense of loss and danger.

Perhaps not many will know of Nyrabia and El Jeiroudi’s activism and intense work in the field of filmmaking, let alone their misfortunes. While the piece shows several moments of truth and intimacy, and occasionally provides some basic contextualisation (the background could be somewhat unclear to those who don’t know anything about the two filmmakers’ biographies or aren’t familiar with Syria’s recent history), the main risk of this 183-minute feature is that it will overload the viewer with fragments that are part of a bigger picture which is hard to decipher. The viewing experience therefore ends up becoming a disrupted informative experience, rather than an emotional one. The video-diary/mosaic format struggles to keep the viewer hooked for the whole running time, but it isn’t devoid of cinematically valuable directorial solutions, images or interesting minor details. For example, we get to know that Nyrabia fails to board his plane (he is arrested by the Syrian authorities in Damascus on 23 August 2012), and intertitles and audio recordings in quick succession manage to recreate the tense atmosphere of those moments. Later, we hear some German citizens’ prejudiced comments on Syrian refugees accompanied by a static image of some wind turbines. There are many other small gems to discover throughout.

The ending depicts a homey image of apparent tranquillity. It closes the film’s final chapter, and said picture is somehow coherent with the idea that the past cannot be undone, and the couple, their friends, the activists who fight for human rights, and Syrians all need to move forward. The general feeling is that this movie is probably more liberating for the filmmakers themselves, rather than for viewers. They were probably driven by a will to deal with their painful past, to put a full stop to it and, like many other artists do, take advantage of the healing power of writing and creation. It’s a totally legitimate choice, but we may well wonder whether this festival was the best place to premiere and promote this type of cinema. Altogether, it’s surely a heartfelt work, which would be easier to enjoy after conducting some minimal research into its protagonists’ vicissitudes.

Republic of Silence is a co-production between Germany’s No Nation Films and France’s Les Films d’Ici, in association with Syria’s Proaction Film and ARTE France, and in collaboration with Italy’s RAI Cinema.