Melgaço is a tiny historic town on the Portuguese-Spanish border where the state of Portugal was born. In 1995, a former prison building was transformed into a cultural center — A Casa da Cultura — which is now a main venue of the MDOC International Documentary Film Festival, whose theme is “Identity, Memory, Border.” What were once small cells on the ground floor are now offices, and the largest room on the first floor is the director’s office, overlooking the atrium where the prisoners used to take their daily walks.
This year, as FIPRESCI celebrates its 100th Anniversary, the festival hosted its first FIPRESCI jury, and we reached our decision for the winning film in the director’s room, with a view of the atrium that is now a gallery space.
The first FIPRESCI award at MDOC went to My Memory Is Full of Ghosts (Thakerati Maleaa Bel Ashbah) by Anas Zawahri, a Palestinian-born filmmaker living in Syria. Zawahri’s hauntingly beautiful debut is dedicated to Homs, Syria’s third largest city, whose citizens survived the siege by the Syrian Army and security forces between 2011 and 2014, during the country’s brutal 12-year civil war.
With a confident and poetic touch, Zawahri blends eerie images and deeply moving survivor testimonies, crafting a film that unfolds like a delicate yet powerful drama before our eyes.
Through honest, personal and direct accounts of survivors in an off-tone narrative, juxtaposed with long static shots of the destruction left by the war, the film begins in a state of contemplation, as if trying to answer the question: Why did we stay here?
A series of women and men speak candidly about their experiences with loss, fear, anger, and shattered expectations.
“Fear is the only feeling that I’ve failed to handle. I did well with sadness and rage,” says one woman. Another recalls being left “homeless, motherless, dreamless, and shattered” after her mother was killed in their home by robbers aged 12 and 16. A blind man who left the city but later returned says he could not see the destruction but could feel it through the sound of bombs. A mother only sees her children through video calls, noticing how they change and age, but she is grateful they escaped the suffering of the war.
When the camera moves, it captures life going on around the destroyed buildings: shops and cafés open, people going about their business, children playing and arguing in the streets: life reclaiming space from ravaged houses with potted flowers and laundry hanging on clotheslines. The normalcy of daily life amid such destruction surprises you at first, but then it becomes a striking demonstration of the human ability to prevail.
It is this wandering camera eye that shifts the film from a portrait of urban devastation to a depiction of a people’s resilience. And the question, Why did we stay here?, turns into: How did we survive?
“I see survival as making small successes in my daily life,” says a woman, adding, “this mutual suffering created a kind of intimacy between us all.”
The uncertainty of the future quietly lingers, never coming straight at us but always present beneath the surface.
As the film draws to a close with one last camera ride, My Memory is Full of Ghosts culminates with a love song, a tender, soulful farewell that transforms the entire story into a profound ode to the enduring strength of the human spirit and the unbreakable hope that keeps humanity moving forward.
by Marina Kostova
Edited by José Teodoro
Copyright FIPRESCI