Chaos

“What does it actually mean to describe the whole of society, the state of an era’s consciousness? It doesn’t mean to repeat the words that society uses; it has to be depicted in a different way. And it has to be depicted in a radically different way, because otherwise nobody will ever know what our time was like.”

This quote from Austrian poet and writer Ingeborg Bachmann provides the conceptual framework for Sara Fattahi’s devastating meditation on the war in Syria, as experienced by three women living in exile. The women live in different places, from Damascus to Vienna, but Fattahi binds them together in a cinematic conversation that speaks to the complexity of personal and collective trauma, what it means to live in exile, and the cognitive dissonance that governs the way we perceive conflict. It is a conversation between the interior and exterior – an impossible conversation.

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Director Sara Fattahi will take part in a post-screening Q&A.