And Then They Burn the Sea
Qumra Projects
/ Short Documentary / Qatar / 2018
In Arabic
Rated: This film has not been rated.
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Synopsis
‘And Then They Burn the Sea’ is a film-poem that reflects on the memories of a mother whose dementia alienated her.
When the protagonist’s mother loses her memories to dementia, so does the certainty of his own. What remains after a loss of memory are spectres of a time and place which he finds are always haunting but never arriving. The associations he holds to the mother become indiscernible from dreams, images, and the places from whence she came and that she won’t be able to recognize in their contemporaneity. Both drawing on the accelerated rewriting of urbanism of cities in Qatar and the crumbling fishermen villages of the 20th century, the protagonist segues between sites of alienation and mourning. Mirroring a series of rituals performed by the sea, the protagonist contemplates an end to mourning for lost memories and futures. Drawing on scenes from the Kuwaiti feature ‘Cruel Sea’ (1972) by Khalid Al Siddiqi, deemed to be the birth of cinema in the Arabian Gulf, where we see the mothers of pearl divers confronting the cruel fate of the sea whose legacies echo in cultural memory. Envisioned as a film-poem, the film threads through a history of images, personal archives, cultural motifs, and a number of texts as an ode to the fragility of memory. What begins as a mournful commemoration of a mother’s memories, turns into a dissolution of the motherland.