Republic of Silence
This program is an opportunity to get in touch with a different perspective from the one offered to us by the media, and to admire the strength of this cinema of exile and displacement created by Syrians in search of justice, freedom and peace.
Twelve years in the making, Republic of Silence bears witness to a tragedy on an epic scale, accompanied by an ever-expanding mosaic of fragile, deeply embedded moments from Diana El Jeiroudi’s life, beginning with the memory from the age of seven when her father gives her a camera, right up to the present day.
Sometimes the frame holds a definitive version of what is happening in the world around the filmmaker. And then it collapses. White letters emerge on a black screen to conjure her inner world in this cinematic memoir. A formal and orderly life in Berlin competes with a life in Damascus that is perforated by dictatorship and dismantled by wars and international political corruption. Director El Jeiroudi takes solace in cinema, music, the serenity of dreams, and the daily solidarity of a durable and abiding love story.
Diana El Jeiroudi
Diana El Jeiroudi is a Syrian independent filmmaker based in Berlin. She is also a producer and co-founder of the DOX BOX International Documentary Festival in Syria and the DOX BOX e. V. non-profit organization in Germany. After a promising career in marketing, El Jeiroudi launched a film production company in 2002 with her partner Orwa Nyrabia. Her first film as a director was The Pot (2005), an experimental documentary short that premiered at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in Japan, then screened in over sixty countries. Her second film, Dolls, A Woman from Damascus (2008), premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) and was screened at Visions du réel, the International Mediterranean Film Festival, the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival and in over forty countries worldwide. His 2021 feature documentary Republic of Silence was part of the official selection at the Venice Film Festival. El Jeiroudi was the first Syrian woman to sit on the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014. With her partner Orwa Nyrabia, she is also the first Syrian woman to be invited to become a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in France.
