Statement Somar Jbawi

Curatorial Statement: Somar Jbawi

WEAVING TOMORROWS
FOCUS 05 Back from Exile - Homage Bassel Shehadeh 

What drives a survivor to walk willingly back into hell? What compels a filmmaker to trade the safety of exile for the frontlines of his homeland, armed only with a camera and an unshakable belief that truth must be told?

These questions haunted me when I first met Bassel’s work — though never the man —during the "Goethe-Institut Damaskus | im Exil" event in Berlin, 2016. Curating his film Streets of Freedom, felt like our first conversation—a quiet "hello" that unlocked later a Pandora's box of stories, visions, and moral clarity. With each subsequent film I programmed, answers emerged, revealing the path he walked with singular courage.

Born in Damascus in 1984, Bassel Shehadeh was a filmmaker, producer, activist, and educator. He declined a Fulbright scholarship to study filmmaking at Syracuse University, choosing instead to return to Syria—not to comfort, but to friends under siege, to a homeland struggling for its freedom.

Bassel's early works reveal an artist in service to the most vulnerable. He accompanied the peaceful protests in Homs, documented the violence of Assad's regime against demonstrators, and trained young photographers and journalists in shooting and editing. His lens never observed from a distance—it stepped into the pulse of events, becoming inseparable from the breath of the story itself. His restless camera moved like a moral compass through the revolution: capturing demonstrations, following white coffins through grieving streets, interviewing revolutionaries, crossing sniper-haunted intersections where every step risked death.

He kept filming until May 2012, when a bombardment took his life alongside fellow filmmaker Ahmad Al Asam. His death silenced a vital voice, but the footage he left behind has become testimony and talisman—a stubborn refusal of erasure.

More than a decade later, in the wake of the Syrian regime's fall in December 2024—a moment Bassel never lived to see but long foretold—Back from Exile invites audiences to witness the images he risked everything to capture. Not as smuggled clips passed hand to hand, but as full public screenings that restore their original power and urgency.

The program traces Bassel’s artistic evolution and moral clarity. A Memory of Forgetfulness, his experimental short, fragments memory and loss through haunting, elliptical imagery. Saturday Morning Gift, his narrative debut, captures the quiet rhythms of ordinary life shadowed by approaching conflict. Our Streets and Celebration of Freedom document the early demonstrations, when chants rang through Syrian streets with unshaken hope. Merry Christmas, Homs reveals a city celebrating under siege — defiant joy amid destruction. In a present still marked by violence and division among Syrians, Back from Exile returns us to the earliest days of the revolution: to the chants, the cameras, and the stubborn, creative insistence on nonviolence.

These works carry us back to the trembling dawn of uprising and forward to the question Bassel placed at the heart of his art: What does it mean to bear witness when witnessing becomes an act of resistance?This program honors Bassel Shehadeh and the countless peaceful activists and citizen journalists whose courage and cameras shaped what the world came to know about their countries at revolution or war. By spotlighting his work, we honor a broader constellation— voices that insisted on dignity and truth even when speaking meant death, when seeing meant becoming a target, when filming meant choosing testimony over survival, art over erasure. 

Somar Jbawi
SyrianFilmmaker
Founder & Director, Film Festival in Exile