Trailer for A Memory in Khaki.
In 2009, the streets of Damascus teemed with people and markets brimmed with life. Old footage finds an aging writer remarking on his city, “I can’t be myself anywhere else.” Syrian filmmaker Alfoz Tanjour’s stirring film reconsiders the old man’s musing eight years later. With the country now ravaged by war, who do you become when that place no longer exists? Weaving the testimonies of four exiles among his own, Tanjour explores the impact of Syria’s crisis on its artists. A rich visual landscape emerges, blending memories of their birth cities with their cities of refuge. Longing and pain blur into beautiful glimpses of colour, some stained forever with military khaki, others running red with vivid pomegranate, each a stunning frame of life. Filled with poetic and visceral stories of revolution and oppression, Memory in Khaki offers one of the year’s most evocative portraits of a people lost in war.