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SILVERED WATER, SYRIA SELF-PORTRAIT

Ossama Mohammed, Wiam Bedirxan France, 2014
It very nearly feels like it needs to be seen in pieces, because of the density and extremity of what it records: images of rubble, torture, and death during the Syrian conflict, sometimes meditative and mournful, other times bare and brutal in their depictions of suffering. And—fair warning—if it's Marker-esque in contemplative outlook, the cats here are in dire shape. Made before today's rising tide of Syria docs, it has a first-responder unfiltered rawness that is perhaps too much to bear.
March 3, 2017
One of the most essential documentaries of the last few years, Ossama Mohammed and Wiam Simav Bedirxan's aggressively personal Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait stands out for its raw directness and pained indirectness.
March 3, 2017
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Simav is the film's heart and heroic soul; her courage is palpable and eye opening. But it's Mohammed's impressionistic, self-referential structure that allows the film's central theme: in a world where comfortable Paris (where the filmmaker was exiled) and bombed-out, desperate Syria can somehow co-exist, there is extreme difficulty in making a movie about war and irreconcilable loss. This struggle and need to create amidst the ruins and self-doubt defines us as human beings.
January 9, 2015
Between [Bedirxan's] firsthand footage and [Mohammed's] selection of YouTube clips from other Syrians, what's presented is an unshakably harrowing document of violence and suffering. Yet it's also, thanks to the warmth and sincerity of their efforts at bridging their divides, and thanks to the battered poetry of what they've constructed, uniquely, if tenuously, affirming.
October 22, 2014
Bedirxan and Mohammed were being applauded for what turned out to be an essential movie. It was also one of the most painful things I have ever seen... Silvered Water also valiantly attempts to make sense of the promiscuity of images. By editing together YouTube shots of horror, by repeating them, slowing them down, and talking at them, Mohammed recovers these tragically banal images' impact and gives them meaning. He makes them personal. He makes them cinema.
October 7, 2014
La Furia Umana
One of the most impressive films was shown out of competition, Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait by Ossama Mohammed (jury president cineasti del presente)... This film is far away from what you're used to see, different because a director uses the clips to create a very personal and dense essay on war, on how to deal with a life threatening crisis, on responsibility as an artist, wondering if he shouldn't be out there with a camera himself.
September 30, 2014
A cri de coeur that implores the West to ponder the consequences of a conflict for which there are no facile panaceas, Silvered Water invites us to immerse ourselves in the unimaginable while making us equally cognizant of our political impotence.
September 4, 2014