Award-winning documentary. Amer and Ragda met and fell in love while incarcerated in a Syrian jail. Following their release, the couple marry and have children. But many years later when violence plunges the country into chaos and war, the family are forced to flee for their lives. Director Sean McAllister follows their plight over the next five years.
Sean McAllister is the kind of documentarist who is prepared to take risks to alert audiences to important issues. And he spent time behind bars to chronicle this struggle of a married couple torn between raising their four sons and exposing the iniquities of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship. Palestinian Amer Daoud met Syrian Raghda Hassan through a hole in the wall of their adjoining cells while both were political prisoners in Syria in the 1990s. After Hassan was imprisoned for publishing a book about their romance, Daoud sought the help of McAllister and the US State Department in highlighting her plight. As this film relates, the family made it to France via Lebanon after Hassan's release during the 2011 revolution. However, she is racked with guilt at having to fight her cause from a distance and her misery begins to impact upon two of her sons - the increasingly radicalised 14-year-old Kaka and the fiercely independent four-year-old Bob. Providing an intimate insight into the realities behind the headlines, this provocative and compassionate study is both timely and essential viewing.
| role | name |
|---|---|
| Director | Sean McAllister |
