Presents the refugee crisis on the big screen
"Joseph's Journey"... A light on the "forgotten" in Syria
The movie starring Ayman Zidan and a number of artists.
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Jude Saeed and Ayman Zidan.
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With the passage of years and the multiplicity of films, it is difficult for filmmakers to find a new approach to the refugee crisis to present it on the screen, but the Syrian director, Joud Saeed, sheds light in his film “Joseph’s Journey” on the “forgotten” who pay daily the price of war and armed conflicts.
The film starring Ayman Zidan, Samer Omran, Ruba al-Halabi, Wael Zidan, Serena Muhammad, Nour al-Sabah, Hayan Bodour, Ahmed Darwish and Jawad al-Saeed, and its events take place within 105 minutes between an unspecified location inside Syria and a refugee camp on the Lebanese border.
The film tells the story of grandfather Youssef, who was not expelled from his home by the war in Syria, nor by the armed militias that took control of his village, but only fear for love prompted him to flee with his grandson Ziad, an orphan of father and mother, with his teenage sweetheart Hajar and her aunt towards the Lebanese border after one of the militia leaders tried Seizing the 16-year-old girl.
The journey extends and does not end upon reaching the border, where the four find themselves prisoners of a refugee camp in which all the meanings of exploitation, bullying the weak, and human trafficking are embodied, and Youssef is forced to marry Hajar's aunt to protect her and keep the two teenage lovers together.
Despite the poor conditions inside the camp and the endless daily problems, there is a glimmer of hope to get out of this quagmire through a young director who is making a documentary film about the refugees. She discovers Ziad’s talent in playing football, so she offers him an opportunity to become a professional and travel far away, which creates a frightening feeling for the grandfather who lost him. The grandson is forever after he devoted his life to his upbringing.
In light of the deteriorating conditions inside the camp and the increasing dangers, especially with the emergence of the leader of the armed militia from which the Yusef family fled again, the grandfather finally accepts Ziyad's travel and hastens to marry him to Hajar to accompany him, but fate does not smile at them in the end.
Director Jude Saeed said, after the world premiere of the film at the Cairo International Film Festival, within the Horizons of Arab Cinema competition: “The end may not be as happy as we are used to in most of our films, but it is intended because the film is called (Youssef’s Journey) with a subtitle (The Forgotten). He explained that “the models that he showed on the screen are for those forgotten people who pay the price of war without any guilt.”
He added, "In fact, I filmed two endings for the film, a happy one in which Ziad and Hajar fulfill their dream, and the other that you saw on the screen, but in the editing stage I found that the realistic ending would be the best, so that we keep remembering that we have to work to change those conditions."
He explained that "the characters in the film are completely imagined, and are not based on a true story, and he worked on writing the story in conjunction with the artist Ayman Zaidan, who embodied the character of Grandfather Youssef."
He pointed out that despite the difficulty and variety of filming locations, the film is of the quality of low-cost films, as everyone who participated in the work contributed with effort, money and resources, ending with the wages, to the extent that the hero Ayman Zidan received a modest wage of no more than 2000 dollars, which is the highest wage that an actor received in the movie. the film.
Work output:
• "The film's characters are entirely imagined, and are not based on a real story. I worked on writing the story in collaboration with the artist Ayman Zaidan, who embodied the character of Grandfather Youssef."
Arab horizons
The Syrian film “Joseph’s Journey” competed among eight films in the Horizons of Arab Cinema competition at the 44th Cairo Film Festival, which concluded its activities yesterday.
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