Background

In 1956, the filmmaker’s father travelled to the GDR to study as an exchange student from Aleppo. Now, living in Leipzig, the filmmaker attempts to reconcile the traces of his father’s time in Germany with the images of the country he encounters in the present. The few photographs taken of his father and isolated documents in German archives go some way to materialising the memories shared between father and son across temperamental long-distance phone lines but the distance, between Syria and Germany, between the 1950s and the 2020s, persists. The gaps are filled by the filmmaker himself, creating images he did not see and memories that he was not told, to work around the limitations placed upon him by borders, technology and time.