Echoes of Ruins

This event brings together Omar Amiralay’s film, A Plate of Sardines (1997), and Al Basateen (2025), directed by Antoine Chapon. Through reenactments, interviews, and landscape imagery, both directors explore the difficulties of excavating memories of destroyed urban places in Syria. Engaging with different sites and time periods, Amiralay and Chapon investigate the layered interplay between politics and place from distinct positionalities.  

In A Plate of Sardines (1997), Amiralay revisits the ruins of Quneitra in the Golan Heights in the company of fellow Syrian filmmaker Mohammad Malas, who is native to this city. Against the haunting images of the devastated neighborhoods, which were occupied by Israel and then abandoned following the 1973 war, the director reflects on his only interactions with Quneitra being through Malas’ cinema, as the city no longer exists. Amiralay interrogates how ruins can become stages for reenactments and the resurfacing of memories.

In 2015, the Basateen al-Razi district of Damascus was razed to the ground as punishment for the population’s uprising against Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Al Basateen (2025) traces the disappearance of the neighbourhood and its oldest orchards, which once stood in Damascus, held by the testimonies of two former residents and the use of 3D animation.   

Coinciding with the final weekend of Stolen Past by Hrair Sarkissian at Ibraaz London, connected themes of collective memory and safeguarding against deliberate erasure will be discussed in a conversion with filmmaker Antoine Chapon, moderated by Emma Bouraba. 

Doors open at 2.30pm; event starts at 3pm and finishes at 4.30pm.