Our Memory Belongs to Us

How do you survive? By forgetting or by remembering? This eternal question is still very alive for the three Syrian activists Yadan, Odai, and Rani. Before the war they were, respectively, a law student, a lover of literature, and a volleyball champion. In 2012, Yadan crossed the border into Jordan, carrying a hard disk containing more than 12,000 videos shot by himself and other citizen journalists in Daraa, the birthplace of the Syrian revolution. In this emotion-laden documentary, the old friends meet again in an empty theatre in Paris after a long period of separation.

Here, on the stage, they share their experiences with us and the Syrian director Rami Farah, to whom Yadan entrusted his hard disk full of scenes of protest and atrocity. The director confronts the three men with their own footage projected on large screens, rekindling their suppressed memories and offering these citizen journalists their say in how Syrian history is presented, and how the story of the revolution is told.