The film opens with shots that could be of a holiday, in a Syria long destroyed. The filmmaker, Sean McAllister (The Liberace of Baghdad, The Reluctant Revolutionary), is in Syria in 2009, visiting as part of a state initiative to drum up tourism. But he is looking for “gritty” stories, the real struggles of real people. Though some Syrians rebuff his enquiries, telling him to stick to the script and asking why he is—and by implication all western journalists—“always looking for something negative”, one night he meets Amer, who is keen on telling him about his imprisoned wife, Ragda. He has found his story.
Ragda and Amer met in Assad’s prisons: he had been a Palestinian freedom fighter and she was a Syrian revolutionary, and he saw her through a hole in his cell wall, bruised and bloodied from a beating by Assad’s thugs. They fell in love and four children later she has written a book telling their story, and is once again in prison. Amer speaks to Sean determined to get her out, but it is only after the ‘Arab Spring’ protests and mounting pressure from the west that she is released. They have a brief period of bliss, clearly very much in love, but as the protests devolve into war, Sean is arrested and his footage of the family confiscated, and they are forced to flee to Lebanon.
They are all unhappy in Lebanon. Ragda feels guilty at having “betrayed” the revolution she helped to start, feeling the need to fight but, as Amer says, torn between “being Che Guevara and a mother”. Amer wants to go to Europe; he sees no future for them since he cannot get work because he is not Lebanese and the children cannot attend school.
