The Aleppo Room

"The Aleppo Room" takes place in Berlin, Germany and focuses on a group of museum guides who have been displaced by the ravages of war. The three Syrian women and one Iraqi man featured in the film are part of an organization called "Multaka", which provides Arabic-language museum tours free of charge to recently arrived refugees.

For this short film, each of the guides narrates a poetic meditation on an art object with which they are well-acquainted from their experience as guides. The Aleppo Room is one such object: an entrance room conserved in the Museum of Islamic Art that is composed of painted wooden panels with motifs from Islam, Christianity and Judaism. This interior was commissioned by a fourteenth-century Christian broker who resided in Aleppo, Syria. As we follow each guide through the film, we learn how their relationship to these art objects is echoed in their own situation of making a new home in a foreign country.