Chaos

Chaos by Sara Fattahi shows three Syrian women in three different cities, connected by the common experience of war. A mother in Damascus, deprived of her son, suffocates her pain in silent resignation and finds support by visiting the empty children’s room every day. On the other hand, a woman* in Sweden affected by a bipolar disorder puts her dreams on paper in collages and drawings. While these two are shown from the front, with sometimes striking close-ups of their faces, in Vienna, the director’s adopted home, another woman* roams the streets of the city – the camera pointed at the back of her head, we usually only see her from behind. Just as anonymous: her flat, unfurnished, empty, except for a few belongings. In contrast to the other two women*, the spectators* do not find out about her fate. If the face and the eyes are windows to the soul, then these remain closed.

Anger, grief, loss, despair, forlornness, mental illness, suicidal thoughts – Sara Fattahi’s film does not address easy topics. In her films she takes up the challenge of making the unfilmed – the complex inner life of the characters – visible (cf. Fattahi in Hering 2018). “I don’t have the courage to commit suicide. But I do have the courage to carry it through another way, which is through oversleeping. I’m absent all the time,” confides a protagonist to her. And to express this blurred and dazed state, this inner “chaos”, the filmmaker uses, among other things, the leitmotivically repeated symbol of the window pane through which the women* look from the inside into the grey outside, underlining the impression of separation, both spatially and mentally.