This article is part of a dossier in partnership between SyriaUntold and openDemocracy's North Africa, West Asia page, exploring the emerging post-2011 Syrian cinema; its politics, production challenges, censorship, viewership, and where it may be heading next.
In the opening scene of Ahmad Ghossein’s 2019 film “All this Victory” (Jidār a-Ṣawt), the protagonist’s wife comes across a makeshift school as she frantically tries to find her husband. He’s disappeared. She suspects he’s travelling south, to the heart of the battle with Israel. It’s July 2006, during the height of Hezbollah’s war with Israel. In the school, a clumsy magician performs tricks for an audience of displaced families, attempting to make a series of objects disappear: a Lebanese flag, a white dove and finally some technical equipment. But rather than disappear, the magician seems to draw attention to the objects, and to his own clumsiness.
