Session #3

Amidst the ongoing war in Yemen; torn between being “safe” and “away”, weighed down by the ever-present mental and emotional baggage that still holds you back. How does one move forward and heal? How to deal with so much suppressed pain? In this profoundly affecting documentary, we investigate these questions and explore what it feels like to be suddenly uprooted and displaced by war.

The real-life story of Aeham Ahmad: a classically-trained musician attempting to escape the war in Syria. Aeham rose to international prominence in 2014, after being filmed singing songs of peace amid the rubble of his beloved hometown of Yarmouk – a besieged Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria.

On the fifth day of the Battle of Crete, Saturday 24 of May 1941, three Germans pass by the village of Kakopetros in the Municipality of Platanias, Chania, and approach the home of Antonis Loufardakis, located next to a creek below the central street. Without any reason at all, they enter their home and kill with automatic weapons five women and a two-year old child. Five-year old Maria witnessed everything, while remained hidden under the bed. Maria shares with us her story and remembers her father saying: Marika… why be afraid?!.

An independent Latvian nation had only existed for two decades when in 1940 the Soviets occupied it, as agreed in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Thousands of Latvians were executed or forced into exile. One year later the Germans arrived as part of Operation Barbarossa, evicted the Soviets and began to exact a heavy toll on Latvia’s population, especially its Jews. In the autumn of 1944, hundreds of thousands of German and also Latvian Waffen–SS soldiers were cut off from the rest of the Wehrmacht and encircled in the Courland Pocket with the Red army on one side and the Baltic sea on the other. The local Latvian population was caught in the middle of intense fighting. The end of the war, however, brought not only relief but also decades of Soviet re-occupation.

Being part of the Soviet Union has changed the way people experience life. Memories of my grandma explore the reasons why Palanga feels isolated and lonely and its people are stuck and lost.