The Hush of Chaos: Pain and Play in Sara Fattahi's Films on the Syrian War

Chaos 1, a film by Sara Fattahi, a relatively new Syrian filmmaker based in Vienna, offered me an opportunity to pause and to think differently about trauma and memory, a topic that I've been writing about for over 20 years. My interest in Fattahi's work was accidental. Almost 2 years ago, I was invited to attend the screening of her film by a small festival in Toronto called Rendezvous with Madness. It was hard to sit through the film - the festival host who introduced it even warned us about this. The film shoots the daily routines of three women who had lived through the Syrian war and are now living under peaceful conditions in three different cities. The war which began in 2011 and continues into the present is not at all represented in graphic or disturbing images of war. Quite the contrary, the camera focuses on the women and their activities at home which are not particularly eventful. The film is slow to move, quiet, and repetitive. The story of the women's experiences of violence and loss is told in small morsels of the their truth. I would describe the impact of the film to be unnerving.

For those whose traumas are fresh, such as Syrians (and so many others in the region and beyond who have been affected by war, displacement, and colonial histories), the wound is on the surface of the skin, not yet a scab. When societies and individuals are still reeling from pain, what might it mean to have a relationship to that pain? In Chaos, the traumas represented are indeed of the recent past and Fattahi's camera is focused on the private and intimate spaces of three women. Her subjects have walked away from the site of trauma but they are viscerally haunted, living in psychic and embodied turmoil. In her first film Coma ,2 however, which is set in Damascus inside the filmmaker's home, the context is not peace but a raging war. In both films, the subject matter is the affective states of her subjects as they engage, Sara, the filmmaker. As all subjects have a person