Mario Rizzi

Excerpt from Al Intithar (2013), 42 secs

30 min

HDCAM film

Produced by and courtesy Mario Rizzi and the Sharjah Art Foundation

Al Intithar is the first film of the trilogy BAYT (HOUSE), which won the Sharjah Art Foundation Production Grant 2012.

The concept of BAYT is inspired by Anthony Shadid's memoir House of Stone (2013), where he writes:

Bayt translates literally as house, but its connotations resonate beyond rooms and walls, summoning longings gathered about family and home. In the Middle East, baytis sacred. Empires fall. Nations topple. Borders may shift. Old loyalties may dissolve or, without warning, be altered. Home, whether it be structure or familiar ground, is finally the identity that does not fade.

In Al Intithar the notion of home has become a sensitive matter in the life of the protagonists, as they had to leave their own. Home is no longer a rooted existence or a solid place for the female character Ekhlas Alhlwani. Instead home has become a tent, having been forced to flee Syria to Zaatari, the refugee camp in the Jordanian desert. The film, which presents itself as an excerpt, follows her life throughout a period of seven weeks, translating the tragic macrocosm of the Syrian war to the intimate microcosm of a relentless woman and her three children.