THE WEDDING IN AFRIN

A wedding ceremony that lasts 10 hours and a city in the course of 10 years that has known the multiple aspects of violence and destruction: Civil war, Islamic State, Turkish invasion, earthquake.

Merwan Berekat often talked to me about his garden.
The garden in Afrin also appears in one of his poems.
And that's how the idea of the film was born.
The idea was rather simple. We are filming with what each of us has in Afrin, 12 years after the start of the war.
Merwan took all the shots with his mobile phone. He recorded his grandchildren, his garden, some of his friends, some short scenes from the daily life of his village on the outskirts of Afrin.
In my mind there is always that garden in Afrin. The garden under the sunflower, the garden flooded with rain water, the garden buried under the fluffy snow.
For me, the garden in Afrin has many, crimson roses in full bloom. I never told Merwan.
During the research, I got my hands on footage from a wedding. The wedding took place in Afrin on September 6, 1995, 15 years before the war began. Ι look over and over at the people in the wedding footage. What happened to all these people? How many survived after the war? How many are still alive today?
When we finished the first shots, we exchanged our footage. The war wasn't over yet. It looks like a war that will never end.
Sometimes I think that this garden never existed. As does Merwan's homeland.