STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

It’s 6,786 miles from Sun Valley to Damascus.

But on Saturday night Wood River Valley residents spent two hours in the boarded apartment of a Damascus family as civil war raged in the movie “In Syria.”

The Family of Woman Film Festival audience heard the sounds of war from helicopter rotor blades beating overhead to the blast of a bomb so loud that they could feel their seats shake.

They got a glimpse at the boredom of a family held hostage by war in explosions that always seemed to come out of nowhere.

They gasped as they watched one of those living in the apartment run across the parking lot outside  only to be felled by a sniper.

And they felt the terror as two burglars bypassed the front door, which was locked and bolted with heavy wooden bars, to get in and traumatize a young mother as the family cowered.

Peggy Goldwyn and her Family of Woman Film Festival has been introducing Sun Valley audiences to the struggles people around the world face on a daily basis for the past 11 years.

And this year was no different as “Mama Colonel” told the story of a police officer trying to convince those in the Democratic Republic of Congo that their children weren’t practicing witchcraft. Or, “Poetry,” which told the beautiful tale of a Korean woman who found a way to hold her grandson accountable for a heinous crime while helping out the victims’s family.

“This film festival is exemplary,” said Hailey resident Pam Jonas. “ ‘In Syria’ stayed with me all night into today.”

Belgian filmmaker Philippe Van Leeuw told the audience that he has always found inspiration in the difficulties of real world struggles—his first film, “The Day God Walked Away,” is about a young Tutsi woman during the Rwandan genocide.

He made “In Syria” after coming to realize how war had stayed with the people in Beirut where he shot two films long after the actual fighting was over.

The film is told over a 24-hour period  in Syria where the civil war between Bashar al-Assad’s government troops and rebel fighters has left nearly a half-million people dead.

Van Leeuw said he wrote the first draft according to how he felt characters would act in such a situation, then validated what he had written with those who had been in such circumstances.

Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass plays a mother who tries to maintain a sense of order with the iron fist of General Patton. She was born without a home, she says, and no one’s going to force her from this one.

She strives to evoke a sense of normalcy as she asks the housekeeper to get the dust out of the house. And both she and her chain-smoking father-in-law somehow manage to express tender moments of love to the young’uns amidst the turmoil.

Emotions swing from an assertation that the war will soon be over to a lament, “We’re all going to die, aren’t we?”

Finally, a friend of the family warns: You are not safe here any longer. We need to get you out of here.

And you wonder: Will mother agree to go this time?

“They’re ordinary people like we—in extraordinary circumstances,” Van Leeuw told the audience.

The film, whose actors have all had experience with war, has no political agenda. Viewers don’t even know if the aggressors are government troops or insurrectionists.

The film won the Panorama Audience Award at the Berlin International Film Festival where, Van Leeuw said, it helped German viewers understand who the Syrians are and why so many of them have sought refuge in Germany.

Van Leeuw noted that his country offers a place where Belgians can meet refugees, taking them home for dinner or to a café.

“It’s not always the same people who come,” he added.  

While Van Leeuw’s film gave a personal glimpse of what it might be like to be under siege, Moroccan filmmaker Mylene Sauloy’s “Girls’ War” offered a documentary look at real-life women who are fighting for their Kurdish people and for Syrian democracy.

The women of “Girls’ War” cheer like school girls as they drive along, “Women! Life! Freedom!”

It’s a chant repeated at meeting of the National Women’s Liberation Movement held in a cave.

The women see themselves as modern Amazonian woman committed to their land and their culture.  They dance by the light of the fire, do housework at night, then practice target shooting in the light of day.

“We can’t hide away if women are being oppressed,” one says.

Four of the women in the film are now in jail for what Turkish authorities are calling a coup attempt. Among them, one who was the mayor of a city of 2 million and another who is the co-chair of a the Free Women Movement. She now faces a possible sentence of 95 years in prison.

Ketchum resident Rebecca Rusch said she was grateful for the portrayal since it’s not something she is exposed to.

“It looks like a modern women’s movement, but it represents 5,000 years of history,” she added.

SEE FILMS FOR YOURSELF

The Family of Woman Film Festival will donate video copies of the films to Ketchum’s Community Library.