About the film:   “194. Us Children of the camp” follows the story of Yarmouk Palestinian camp in Syria as of 2011, through the eyes and experiences of a group of young residents of the camp. The film follows the director’s journey as he is forced to join the Palestinian Liberation Army in Syria only a month before the start of the Syrian uprising. With the escalation of violence and the increasing attacks by the Syrian regime army on the camp, the director and his friends attempt to document the hopes, struggles, departures and loss they experience.    Director: Samer Salameh Producer: Bidayyat Year of production:... more

  Seven-thirty exactly   The camp’s streets lie utterly bare, nothing relieving the loneliness of these ruined walls piled one atop the other like books tossed down unread. The plants that have sprouted and grown in the middle of the road, they made the place more desolated, like some additional sign that much time has passed since anyone last came here. Even the cats have abandoned this street.   In the distance the sun makes its daily drop to the horizon.   A last ray lights the scattered dust of this arid sunset. The place is wrapped in a deep silence disturbed only by the buzzing... more

  The crowds fill the foreground, a river of thin bodies, faces packed between two parallel, receding lines of ruined buildings. The closest face is that of an elderly woman, wearing black shawl on her head. I’ve never seen an exhausted face with quite this kind of parched fatigue before. It is an epic image, it could be a canvas by some great artist, but the truth is it is just a single snapshot from the siege of the Yarmouk Camp in Damascus. How can an image such as this be beautiful, so very beautiful? We are used to describing colours as beautiful... more

" Siege" is the outcome of a workshop via Skype with twelve young people under siege in Yarmouk  Camp near Damascus since almost a year and a half. This film expresses four daily realities of this siege. While finalizing their films, the situation in Yarmouk got worse and it became difficult for them to meet together. They persevered and here are their intimate reflections.   Director: Abdullah al-Khatib, Deaa Yahea, Moayad Zaghmout, Baraa Nmrawi, Jamal Khalife, Mohammad Alsukari, Wassim Mnwar, Abdul Rahman Saleem, Omar Abdullah, Nawar Al-Youssef Duration: 9:14 min Year of production: 2015 Produced by: Bidayyat in partnership with Watad  

In at least one place where tomorrow feels lost, music still fills the gashed present with a kind of home-made mercy. The place is Yarmouk Palestinian Refugee Camp outside Damascus, the present is a siege of over 450 days, and the music—unlike water and electricity–keeps flowing unstoppably from Ayham Ahmad’s battered upright piano.   Much more than a mere soundtrack, this music is the hero of the short, bittersweet documentary “I Am Blue”, which pays homage to Ayham’s insistence on composing in the midst of devastation, and the camp’s collective struggle to endure. Indeed, rather than surrendering to despair, the composer and... more

I've had a recurring dream since I fled the Yarmouk Refugee Camp and came to Beirut. The dream takes me back to besieged Yarmouk, where death and destruction have found a way to settle in all its details. I am not sure whether it is a dream or a nightmare. But I live in this open-ended waiting with images of that place and the difficulty of abandoning it. Maybe the sound of my friend Ayham's piano changed the nightmare into dream and the place into a legend. Here, there is no geography, a place between two times, the first is... more