_{BACK by Yazan Rabee}

It’s a dream which Yazan Rabee keeps on having - and which has inspired his short film BACK (receiving its international premiere in the Berlinale). He wakes up in his old neighbourhood in Syria only to discover that a forest has grown up round it. He reaches his home but a ghost in military fatigues comes chasing after him and he has to run…

“I am not the only one. A lot of Syrians have the same dream,” Rabee says. To his amazement, when he spoke to fellow Syrians exiles, they revealed that their dreams were almost identical to his. “I [therefore] thought I am going to make this film, but not just about me.”

Rabee was 17 years old in 2011 when the demonstrations against President Bashar Hafez al-Assad broke out in earnest across Syria. “At first they were not happening in Aleppo where I came from, but later in 2012, they started in Aleppo, my home city.”

The moment the unrest began, Rabee, who had been studying engineering, participated in the demonstrations. Violence escalated. Armed groups joined in the conflict. In 2014, his father advised him to leave the country. That is how he ended up in the Netherlands in late 2016 (having spent time in Turkey first).

From his earliest childhood, Rabee had been passionate about cinema, watching old European movies with his uncle. He was a fan of films like The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas and of old spaghetti westerns (“where people don’t talk too much, they just look”). As a kid, he also began writing short stories. He had hoped to study theatre in Syria but his family encouraged him to do something more “realistic.”

After arriving  in the Netherlands and learning to speak Dutch, Rabee applied to go to the art school in Breda. (He finally graduated last summer).

BACK includes disturbing archive footage of demonstrations during which the authorities suddenly shoot at peaceful protesters chanting for freedom. There are arrests and deaths. In one chilling moment captured in slow motion, a protester locks eyes with a policeman just as the cop is taking aim to shoot at him.

Rabee wanted to understand why the state turned on its own citizens in this way. He realized that he had to go back in time to the rule of Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, another strongman political leader ready to spill the blood of Syrians in order to hold onto power.

“In 1979, there were also demonstrations against [Hafez] Assad… he answered that by bombing the cities.”

In the early 80s, 20,000 people were estimated to have been killed in a single town. “That was the moment when the generation of my parents said, ok, we are going to be stuck here and so we have to protect ourselves; we have to teach our children to love Assad.”

BACK had its Dutch premiere at the Netherlands Film Festival. It was produced through Prospektor with Artillerie as co-producer.

The director is currently working on a new short, which has the working title, The Man, The Crow and The Wheel. “It’s about love and death,” he says of a project dealing with very weighty subject matter. (It comes as little surprise to discoverer that Rabee is a big fan of Russian literature, the works of Dostoevsky in particular, or that he uses the name Dmitri Karamazov as his alter ego on social media.)

Rabee may still dream of Syria but he accepts he has little chance of returning in the near future. “Let’s be realistic and look at what is going on there now. Other regimes like Turkey are now normalizing relations with Assad, the same regimes who 10 years ago were saying that Assad is a criminal,” he reflects. “I think he [Assad] is going to stay for a long time. If he stays, I can’t go back to Syria…,” he pauses before adding: “the reason why I fled out of Syria was for dignity. If I go back, I don’t have that dignity anymore.”
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