The Day I Lost My Shadow (Soudade Kaadan, 2018) The story of Sana and her son and what they do to survive in today’s Damascus, torn apart by the never ending civil war. In the normal course of events in their day; the electricity is switched off, they glory in having running water, Sana clears up broken glass at work and they live with the fear that the war might come ever closer and into their apartment.
Events spiral out of all proportion after they run out of bottled gas in the apartment and Sana goes off in search for this with a friend and her brother. They survive an incident with a taxi driver evading a checkpoint and then face further misfortunes. This leads the intrepid trio almost spiral down a rabbit hole where they maybe don’t end up in wonderland but in the middle of and environment where they meet a number of characters who offer a number of different challenges and opportunities, with varying degrees of good and poor fortune.
Maybe this is the experience of living in a war zone, especially when the war in question is a civil war. Maybe you don’t always know which way up and down is, and who is on which side as they may have changed since yesterday. The film highlights that the victims of these wars are ordinary working people, it’s their lives that are turned upside down, it’s they that become collateral damage, when all they are trying to do is to live their life.
It’s these people that live in the shadows and as the title suggest it’s death that takes these shadows away. The distinction is made with Hiroshima, where all that was left of the dead was their shadow. This is a fine film that reminds us what happens when a nation falls in on itself and maybe it’s the act of these people living, or attempting to live a normal life, that will eventually lead a country lie Syria out of darkness.
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