P24 Welcomes London’s Frontline Club to Istanbul
Turkish debut of Sean McAllister’s A Syrian Love Story attracts wide audience
25.01.2016
The Frontline Club, the London home for independent journalists, staged its first event in Istanbul in partnership with Punto24 – the first Turkish screening of the award-winning documentary A Syrian Love Story. This was followed by a discussion between director Sean McAllister and Raghda Hassan, the film’s protagonist. The moderator was Can Ertuna who covered the Arab uprisings for Turkish NTV.
“The Frontline has to be where the journalists are,” the club’s founder Vaughan Smith told a packed auditorium at the Galata Salt gallery. Many in the audience were foreign correspondents and international freelancers, reflecting Istanbul’s growing importance as a regional base. Many of those had first-hand experience of covering the grim political events in Syria depicted in the documentary.
The film is an exceptionally intimate view of the way those events impact on the personal. It narrates the relationship between Amer and Raghda, two political activists who first met through a chink in the wall of a Syrian prison. They are released, start a family and the film begins in 2009 when Raghda is yet again in detention and Amer left to fend for the three children. Eventually she is released but the marriage never recovers its cohesion.
At one point they are forced to flee to Jordan after McAllister himself is taken into custody and the authorities discover incriminating footage. In all, the family moves 16 times during the course of the documentary, finally to France. What should be a happy ending turns sour with Raghda unable to adopt to exile. The film records as a fly on the wall, disappointment, anger, an attempted suicide but also love among the ruins.
At first the film was 80 per cent about Syria and 20 per cent about the people – “but in time that ratio reversed,” McAllister told the audience. The film is remarkable for the trust between documentary maker and subject. It continues up to 2015 by which time McAllister has himself become a virtual member of the family, the confident of the three children, who acquire compassion and maturity while surrounded by pain.
One of the most moving moments is when the oldest son, the most carefree and least politically engaged, goes through his Facebook page pointing to friends who have died, including the girl we have seen years past whom he once tried to woo.
At the screening, Andrew Finkel from P24 expressed how pleased as an organisation they were to be associated with the screening of A Syrian Love Story and of the Frontline Club’s efforts to provide a focus for the freelance community in Turkey. Operating independently of a large media group was becoming an ever greater option for Turkish journalists as well, given the changing economics of the profession and the political pressures affecting members of the profession who clung to a sense of integrity.