For Episode 11 of our Cinematic Dialogs series, directors Abdallah Al-Khatib and Ziad Kalthoum speak with one another about their film practices, and the state of cinema production in Syria today.
Abdallah Al Khatib was born in Damascus in 1989 and currently resides in Germany. A director, writer, and human rights defender, he identifies as Palestinian-Syrian. He studied sociology at the University of Damascus and is currently continuing his studies in Germany. Al Khatib was named Peacemaker of the Year in 2014 by German Greenpeace and won the Swedish Per Anger Prize for Human Rights in 2016. His award-winning debut documentary, Little Palestine—Diary of a Siege (2021), was selected for several festivals, including Visions du Réel and the Acid program at the Festival de Cannes. In 2023, he began working in fiction with his short film Sokrania 59.
Ziad Kalthoum is a Syrian filmmaker currently living in Berlin. He was born in Homs in 1981. In 2012, during the outbreak of the Syrian revolution, he began working on his first feature film The Immortal Sergeant while serving a compulsory military service. The film had its premiere at the Locarno Film Festival in 2014. In 2015, he won the BBC Arabic Festival in the ‘Best Feature Documentary’ category.
Refusing to fight his own people, he deserted from the Syrian Army in 2013 and fled to Beirut where he started to work on Taste of Cement. The film has been traveling to festivals around the world and has won various awards, among them the Golden Sesterce for Best Feature Documentary at Visions du Réel in 2017.
