Sarjeila, a village in Syria’s Idleb governorate, Sarjeila died when its inhabitants abandoned it 1,300 years ago, leaving to posterity their solid stone dwellings, an olive press, and graves. Then suddenly, life returned with the arrival of new residents who fled war and death, to live like ghosts in houses abandoned centuries before.

The film follows the lives of three families who came to the village to build new homes there, and records their relationship with the place and how the place itself is changing.

It is a journal of people forced a thousand years back into the past, their lives destroyed by war and they themselves destroying antiquities, consciously or not, without even realising the significance of what they are doing. Their present existence blends with myths about the people who once lived here, who the current inhabitants describe as ghosts.

This film has received the support of Bidayyat’s documentary grant 2015