i/Eye in Conflict: Personal Stories from the Middle East

The Arab Spring may not have fulfilled its promise of a new democratic order, but another, simultaneous revolution in the region has succeeded. Over the past four years, the turmoil in the Middle East has galvanised locals – filmmakers and amateurs alike – to capture events on camera, including smartphones. The resulting wave of guerrilla documentaries has not only fed outsiders’ awareness of what’s happening in the region – it has also given the Middle East, including Turkey, a new weight on the international film festival circuit. In this sense at least, democracy has arrived.
The movement began in the wake of the first demonstrations in 2011, with a handful of documentaries about the Tahrir Square uprising drawing attention later that year. If Egypt has remained the most prolific exponent of hard-hitting docs – 2013’s The Square is the most high-profile film to have emerged from the Arab Spring so far – conflicts in Palestine, Syria, Turkey and more recently Yemen have also inspired some brilliant work.
This mini-season at the Barbican includes films from all those countries. Some are explicitly concerned with today’s wars: Silvered Water, Syria Self Portrait for one weaves together myriad first-hand footage of the fighting in Syria. Others examine current affairs obliquely through private narratives: take My Love Awaits Me by the Sea, a remarkable account of a fraught road-trip from Amman to Palestine. They are all personal testaments of a kind, but in their variety and daring experiments, they speak to the new energy of cinema in the Middle East.
Most of the screenings are accompanied by Q&A sessions with the filmmakers.