“This is not a film, but a part of your life,” producer Gilles Sandoz states in the first few minutes of TrepaNation, when Syrian director Ammar al-Beik visits him. al-Beik has spent ten years documenting his life as a refugee in Germany – ever since 18 September 2014, when a camp opened on the outskirts of Berlin, in which he was assigned a room. “It will screen in July,” likely referring to Karlovy Vary, is his voice message to an unknown caller. It seems that al-Beik does not simply want to jump straight into the action of his 222-minute beast of a documentary film essay; he is cordially inviting the audience in, setting the scene for a trip down memory lane, replete with despair, hope and inspiration.

The film, which has had its world premiere in the Proxima Competition of the 59th Karlovy Vary IFF, has myriad influences. Filmed entirely with al-Beik’s mobile-phone camera, it is a collage of amateur camera footage, famous paintings, quotations and musical scores. There is Goethe, there is Nina Hagen, but there are also the tunes of Skyrim. Basically, everything that would leave an impression on a refugee in Europe over the intense timespan of ten years – titbits of the new life, memories of the old one.

Anthony Quinn domineers in film clips from 1976’s The Messenger, swearing his allegiance to the Prophet Mohammad. At other times, this pompous cinematic setting is exchanged for mobile-phone footage of drones diving down onto housing blocks in Syria, or of his refugee-camp friend Abu Ali lying bleeding on a stretcher, his face torn up by shell fragments. There are personal pictures and footage of the past, as well as pillorying images of former dictator Bashar al-Assad, snapped for a magazine feature about his home by none other than war photographer James Nachtwey.

In his documentation of the refugees’ home, al-Beik is rather unapologetic about the dire living conditions and the filth lying in every corner. One such gruesome glimpse we get is of the dirty kitchen, the burned stove, the huge pile of rubbish and the leftover food that nobody took out. One can applaud al-Beik, however, for not setting out to make some sentimental poverty porn. Instead, this pyramidic pile of trash becomes the outline for his symbolic “triangle of salvation”, on whose vertices Jean-Luc Godard, Alexander Kluge and Diego Maradona rest. Two of these are filmmakers whom any young artist would aspire to, while one of them is a beacon of strength and fair play, as al-Beik puts it.

On a less famous note, the director also centres this essay on his mother, who died during the war in 2012 in Syria, and his wife Caroline, who was imprisoned by the regime in 2012 for smuggling baby formula and nappies. “One of the hardest things is not being able to bury our loved ones,” his voice muses at a key moment. al-Beik keeps spiralling in his narrative, which might be a reflection of the repetitiveness of daily life in a refugee camp. The intersection of Europe and the Middle East, the creative peak and the humanitarian plight are always there. But one has to scour through 222 minutes of film to truly find the gems. Once again being “meta”, al-Beik repeatedly comments on editing and the length of the movie. But a tighter grip on what to show would indeed have benefited this work immensely.

TrepaNation is a Syrian-German-French co-production staged by GS Films and Shams Films at Grammar Factory.