Five Seasons of Revolution covers a period in Syria’s history from 2011 to 2015. What inspired you to bring the film forth now in 2023?
Lina: There were the practical aspects and the fact that even after the shooting was over, the story and the characters were still developing. Situations were shifting. Who do we keep in? Who do we take out? All the security conditions were changing as people were moving around. We had to continuously adapt to that.
Also, because the story is very close to me, as both a character and storyteller, I needed a bit of distance before I could look back and reflect quietly and be in control of the film instead of letting it take over me.
This film is not about the splashing headline. It is not a journalistic work that had to be produced fast. It is neither specifically linked to the period from 2011 to 2015 nor specifically linked to Syria. The things we see in the film can happen anywhere—people anywhere in the world can find themselves facing similar questions and challenges, dealing with how they decide to react, survive, the mistakes they make. The fact that this concrete example is in Syria I don’t think changes the relevance of the film for a world audience.
The film is so personal. We watch your journey into war and the country’s descent in chaos. Can you speak more to the experience of that? As you say, it’s happening all over the world.
L: You always want to think that this is the sort of thing that happens elsewhere. In Syria, obviously we’re in the Middle East. There was a civil war in Lebanon when I was growing up. There has been a war in Iraq ever since I can remember. The occupation of the Palestinian Territories, all of it. So it’s not like armed conflict is very far away from us.
And yet we never saw this coming. In 2010 if you had asked anyone if there was the slightest possibility of something of this scale happening in Syria, they would have laughed. And yet it did. It happened. And we were so overwhelmed. And even as it happened, everyone kept saying, “It cannot get any worse.” And every time we thought we had hit rock bottom, it got worse. So I think it’s part of human nature to want to think that whatever security and tranquility we have is permanent and untouchable. Unfortunately, it isn’t.
People will surprise themselves with how they react and adapt. I would have been very surprised to watch this film about myself fifteen years ago. It would have been hard for me to believe that I’m going to do these things, I’m going to react this way, my friends are going to do these things. It is a process of self-discovery—the hard kind of self-discovery. It’s also a process that allows you to find out what really is reliable and concrete and true in your life and what is optional—things you never thought would be optional—and that you can survive way more than you think you can.
All of that is very hard to learn but also important to learn. I’m not addressing war as a great opportunity because obviously, it is not, but I think it can help give people perspective in their own lives—people who are currently in different states of conflict, like in Ukraine, where war has just started and they’re still grasping with the unbelievable situation that their city has been emptied; or like in Colombia, where people are still in a very long and painful process of reconciliation after a civil war and trying to make sense out of the chaos that happened.
I think it’s useful to document this process day to day. Because a bomb can fall on a building and end the lives of everyone in it in seconds but to undo an entire country is not something that is even comprehensible in a sense. Even though when we were walking through it, we were basically walking in darkness and touching each step as we went, in retrospect I think it helps to get a sense of how it happens.
Now, having been through what you have, what do you think is permanent and untouchable?
L: It’s very different from one person to the other, because it’s a very individual thing. But it was at times really mind-blowing to watch how—at least among my friends—how each person had their little jewel, their precious conviction, their faith in one thing, their perspective on how to be in the world and no matter what they went through, they kept interpreting it through that little passion they had.
And so the same event would lead to different conclusions from two different people because they each have their own views. There’s something about how an individual looks at the world. You have the eternal optimist, for instance. We still have optimists until today in Syria. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine, but these people are still there. And then there are the pessimists who packed their bags on day one and said, “This country is over,” and people had barely started demonstrating.
So that’s on the individual level. On a group level, I would say people’s connections to their memories are surprisingly resilient—even though from editing the same footage for ten years, I can definitely tell you that memory is not something to trust. It was mind-blowing for me to rediscover things in my own footage seven years into it— after having been there at the moment, shot it, watched it over and over so many times—and then at one moment I’m sitting next to my editor and she points out something and I literally see it for the first time. Our memory is so selective, so fragile. We mix things up in our heads. And yet people hold on to their memories so dearly no matter what happens. It’s amazing.
Personally for me the things that proved to be real and true and that survived throughout were human relations, were friendships, the close emotional ties that you have with people. I might pick up the phone and call one of my old friends with whom I haven’t spoken for eight years and we pick up the conversation where we left, like no pause has even happened. It’s magical. And at the moment where you have to literally leave everything behind except the clothes on your back, the one thing you can count on are very good friends.
I would say also, if you’re lucky, your education, your profession might be something that sticks with you, but even that isn’t always the case because you might be a doctor in Syria and in the United States no one will recognize your degree and you will be driving a taxi.
One of the things that really comes through in Five Seasons of Revolution is that each person has this jewel as you say, their own way of relating to what is happening and how they are going to respond. One of the things we see in the film is a very understandable sense of helplessness.
L: At the moment things were happening, we didn’t feel helpless. It was more like, “We don’t have the blueprints, we’re trying to guess our way through this maze we’re in.” Actually, it was quite the opposite of helplessness—we were born in helplessness, we’d been living under so much oppression for so long that when the revolution started, it was our first chance to feel that we could do something to reclaim our voice. That was extremely empowering. And even though we didn’t arrive at achieving our goal, we did reclaim our voices. With that alone, we no longer felt as hopeless as we were.
In the end, when we look at the bigger picture of what happened in the country and how we were not able to save it, we felt guilty. We really thought that we could do it and the fact that we didn’t meant that it was our personal failure. We had to find a way to deal with the guilt because we didn’t feel helpless, we felt extremely empowered. Maybe that’s part of being young, maybe that is the mindset that actually activates a revolution, and maybe it’s just that this revolution needed to happen because the situation was so very hopeless before.
Maybe that sense of helplessness comes later in the film as we watch the constant fractionalizing that resulted in more and more violence, more and more alienation, more and more hatred. It’s in the later seasons.
L: For certain we could not stop the opposition from getting fractured, we could not stop the extremists from getting into the country, we could not stop the weapons being imported into the wrong hands, we could not stop even the people who used to be pacifists from flipping and grabbing the first rifle they could get their hands on.
We could not stop any of that but again, the emotion was more one of guilt than accepting, “This is something that is impossible.” We kept thinking, “This is something that is doable” and if we didn’t do it, then it’s our fault. This frustration of the guilt—that we’re not getting it right, making the right choices—was building up and creating more fractions. We were not fractioning because we didn’t like each other or we doubted each other.
Around the end what we start feeling is that it’s impossible to stop. Yes, I guess you could call it helplessness. If you asked Rima or Susu, they could tell you they had to deal with this sense of falling from grace. At the peak of the revolution, we thought, “We’ve reclaimed our streets, we’ve reclaimed our voices, we’re going to make this country work.” Rima really felt she could fix the path when she saw the divergence that happened, that she could bring the revolution back to being peaceful, and even though she did create a movement, she didn’t unite the entire opposition under that flag obviously. I think it was very complex for her how she emotionally handled that. Maybe she felt misunderstood, alienated, that she spoke a different language from everyone around her. We were living on adrenaline. It’s very hard to step back and see the big picture. Unless you have what happened here—ten years of editing the film. Then you have a bit more perspective.
Now, ten years out, how do you feel about that feeling of guilt that you were in at the time?
L: It took years to get over the guilt and to learn to forgive myself and others. That was something very important for me to try and communicate in the film. Whether it’s a revolution turned civil war in your country or abandoning your high school band—just to learn to look back at your youth with a bit more forgiveness is very important, especially as you reach middle age.
I know so many of my friends and so many activists in Syria still struggle with this feeling of guilt. Even though we were not the ones dropping the bombs and doing the shooting, we still somehow feel guilty toward how the country ended up, and that’s in part because of regime propaganda blaming the destruction on whoever demanded their rights. There was this narrative that was extremely common not only among regime supporters, but among the people we used to call “the gray zone people,” the middle ground people: “You know Assad’s insane, you know he’s going to throw all the weapons he has at you, why do you do it if you don’t know how to defend yourself? You know it’s a violent regime, you know they’re going to shoot, why do you demonstrate?” With that kind of logic being thrown in your face year in and year out and seeing the devastation your country has fallen into, it’s hard to resist feeling a little guilty as crazy as that argument is.
That’s why in the film it was important to me to have different characters who follow different paths—to show that it wasn’t that you specifically made the wrong choice, and if you had only taken that left turn back then, you would have saved the country. No. We tried different things, we tried a variety of things, lots of people did. I know this from talking to people who found watching the film very painful—not because they thought the film was badly done or didn’t represent things well enough, but because it was hard for them to go back and watch the people they were ten years ago making mistakes that they still feel were gigantic and they still feel guilty about. So it’s a process of facing and sorting all the emotions. And sharing with others who might go through this experience somewhere else in the world.
Let’s talk about where Syria is now. How do you feel about where the country is today? What are your hopes, your dreams for its future?
L: I have been away for several years so I am not in as much of a position to tell you what the country is like now as much as someone who still lives there. I have friends and family, I talk with them, I follow the news. But there is so much that you cannot communicate over the phone or in messages or in journalistic articles. Syria is in a place that no one knows how to get out of. Neither the regime nor the opposition nor the gray zone people nor the previous activists nor the secret police have a clue of how to get out of this.
And it’s not only the war. The war is the extra layer that’s complicating things. In talking about, for instance, the economy: The Syrian currency is crashing. You’d think it’s because of the civil war, but then you look at Lebanon and there it’s crashing as well, and you look at Egypt and it just crashed, and Jordan’s been barely keeping afloat. Iraq, let’s not even start talking about that.
We also used to draw these comparisons with the countries that had Arab Spring revolutions, you have all the possible scenarios: You have Libya: They got the dictator and killed him and still ended up in civil war. In Egypt: They got the dictator, they tried to do it through the courts, the army still switched the tables and the old regime came back with a new face. In Yemen: They used arms, they resisted, the ex-president didn’t win and yet the country descended. So looking back at the question that was so central at one point—should the revolution stay peaceful or should it take up arms?—then we look at Egypt, the revolution stayed peaceful, it succeeded. And of course the situation in Egypt is a lot better than the situation in Syria. But it’s still really, really bad. It’s really bad all over the region and no one knows where we’re going. Even in Turkey, the currency there is crashing as well.
Where would I like to see it go? Number one, stop the killing. Not only the bombing and shelling and battles and attacks and random recruitment of eighteen-year-old boys from their families to send them to die on the front for a cause they don’t get but also to release the political detainees that are still in jail that are still being tortured to death by the hundreds of thousands. And end the dictatorship. Whatever path we have to go through to get out of this, a dictatorship is never the answer. I think without these things there’s no way out.
Where are you now?
L: I am in Europe. I travel around a lot. A lot of the work on the film was done in Berlin. We did some post-production in Holland. I have family and friends all over, I move around. But I didn’t do very well in Berlin so I escaped to somewhere more sunny, to take long walks in the sun.
Do you want to go back to Syria?
L: I can’t so there’s an easy answer that helps me to not overthink whether I would or not. I definitely would like to be able to visit because I still have family and friends I’d like to see. It’s not easy especially when you have elderly members of your family and the years go by and you’re not sure if you will be able to see them again or not. So if I would think of a very good reason I’d like to go back and visit, that would be number one.
By the time I left, the country had already changed so much that it became a very different place. I knew it didn’t make sense to miss the country in the sense that it isn’t that place anymore. Even if you go back to the geography, it’s different now. So that is one reason why I would maybe not want to go back: I know it got way worse and I don’t really want to see it like that.
One of the many ways Five Seasons of Revolution is very effective is the way it documents that creeping change in the country. It’s almost surreal the way in Damascus you’re largely removed from the violence of the war but then you get in your car and you’re driving to Homs or Aleppo and you’re driving into hell. We can feel the encroaching chaos and craziness and destruction and grief.
L: The destruction wasn’t equally distributed. Homs was really devastated. It was basically urbacide, what happened in Homs. They were using genocide to carry out the urban plan. There had been an urban plan to redesign the entire city that the regime had been pushing for years before the revolution started. People opposed it as much as they could and when the revolution started and Homs became its capital and eventually rebels created strongholds in the city, the regime used that as an excuse to actually carry out the plan for the city they already had. The way they were shelling made no sense when you compared it to where rebels were and where demonstrations were happening: They would heavily bombard an area that didn’t have rebels and not so much an area where everyone knew the rebels were.
I cannot compare what happened in Homs with the situation in Damascus, although there are some areas in Damascus that underwent the same thing. In some of the scenes in the film, you see that we’re looking out a window. The window’s pretty high and it’s overlooking an area where all the buildings are much lower and there’s a lot of trees. This area is in the suburbs on the outskirts of the city. Most of these buildings are called illegal housing because it’s supposed to be the green belt. For years the regime had been trying to knock these buildings down. So there again the demonstrations were used as an excuse to completely evacuate the entire area. Now when you look at it, it’s empty: no trees, no buildings, it’s a desert, it’s flat completely. And we’re talking about kilometers and kilometers of space. Thousands and thousands were evacuated. And it was no rebel stronghold there.
The amount of displacement that happened in Syria: Roughly speaking two-thirds of the population had to move from their homes. One-third relocated within the country, another third left the country. So only a third of Syrians were able to stay in their homes. You can imagine how much this changed the social fabric of the cities. If I walked in my street today, I don’t think I’d know anybody. And maybe no one would remember me. It changed hands so much that I’m surprised and relieved when I hear that something is still there, like a café we used to go to has somehow managed to survive. I don’t expect it any more.
Do you have a favorite moment in the film?
L: My personal favorite moments tend to be the more mundane, random moments when we’re sitting together on the couch, cracking jokes, talking to the cats, those things that day in and day out fortified our friendship. I do really like the closing scene, where Rima defends Susu smoking. At the beginning of the film, there’s the moment where we’re preparing for the strike, gathering the printer, the paper cutter, the balloons. We’re feeling super empowered and optimistic and part of something big that’s going to make a difference. It was very tense, silly as it looks—putting little pieces of paper into a big red balloon and releasing it. That moment had its very good, positive tension, these were the happier days. Oh yes, also when Susu’s friend is released from prison and it starts to snow. It was like this miracle that came down on us from the sky and allowed us to celebrate his release in the open. It looked like we were just filming people playing in the snow, so we could film openly in the street for the first time in two years of shooting.
What would you like audiences to take from the film?
L: The number one aim would be that they feel they’ve shared the experience of what we went through rather than that they’ve learned information about what happened. From there, maybe they can relate—maybe they’ve gone through something similar, perhaps a difficult situation they went through with a friend or the loss of a loved one or maybe they’ve gone through a war previously or their grandparents went through a war and never want to talk about it and they always wonder why it’s so hard for them to talk about it. I think there are many levels, many ways, of finding something that belongs to you or fits into your life in the film.
What’s keeping you going, Lina?
L: The sun doesn’t wait for anyone, it comes up every morning. I don’t really have an option. But for awhile, it was quite a struggle to answer that question. It took me time to find my way back.
I think just feeling grateful for all the things I did not lose that I very easily could have lost at any given moment. And learning how precious these things are and how important it is for me to treasure them, to use them, to build on them, to not take them for granted. And to do the best I can with what I have, because there will always be people who I can help, people who can benefit from me, people who somehow depend on me. I can still be useful to the world in some way or another. So why go to waste?