From the besieged Eastern Ghouta and with the participation of the people of Douma, This Video was filmd. For this video to see the light means that all the barriers of injustice, siege, bombardment and airstrikes can’t prevent this song from reaching its people and leave its mark. “Meen?” (Who?) is the question that Douma’s families ask again to themselves, to us, and to the world, on the beat of Bu Nasser's song, sending greetings from Douma to Bekaa and from there to Beirut and Lebanon. “Meen?” (Who?) every time you ask this question you get a step closer to the truth.   Tatlit Bu Nasser... 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 caption included in the closing credits brings you up short and reminds you just how perilous life is in Syria. During the four months it took to make the short film, ‘Siege’, one film-maker lost his father to a sniper from the Assad regime. Another was almost kidnapped, and a third was killed during an ISIS attack on the Palestinian Yarmouk Camp in Damascus. The casualties did not end there. The co-ordinator of the Watad Center, the main partner in the making of the short film, was assassinated in his home.   “This is just a small glimpse of the siege on Southern... more

  More than two years have passed and the Syrian regime still besieges the Southern suburbs of Damascus where a population of more than 100,000 people live until today. During those two years, more than 200 died of hunger and the lack of medical care. The remaining still live under the siege, surviving only by what grows from the earth such as grass and other green leafs and vegetables. They fight the siege and hunger through hope and love they have learned to find during the hardest of time.      Director: Mattar Ismaeel Duration: 15:35 Produced by: Bidayyat  Year of production: 2015  

    That day, just after noon, as I was on my way to the cigarette stall (a small table, chairs, a few packs of cigarette of two or three brands, all of them open because they are sold singly) the heavens rang. It was the whistling again, the sound that had begun to play on my nerves, the huge hit of adrenalin freezing everything, even time. The sound of an aircraft, which  you hear when you step outside, or more precisely, when you step outside and realize, instinctively, that you are directly inside the target zone.   In films, time stops at such... 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

DOUMA—We have lost sight of the outside world, a gift that other people take for granted. Our universe has become so small and shattered. "The universe starts in Al-Mleiha and ends in Douma," Abo Mahmoud told me one night, referring to two of the suburbs in our besieged world of East Ghouta, a conurbation just outside Damascus. Time slipped by as we sat his dim room, illuminated only by a tiny battery-powered bulb. Abo Mahmoud is only forty but he looks like an elderly man. I remember how he was back in 2011, when the demonstrations began: young in spirit... more