Estahbes (If Only the Year Had 364 Days)

CN: Violence, Torture 
Almourad Aldeeb uses the camera as a means of confronting the past. In 2013, he and several friends were arrested by the Assad regime and tortured for months. Years later, he is living in Germany and, following the fall of the regime, returns to their former prison. He shows the empty rooms and describes what happened. Aldeeb refuses to let violence find its way into the images; the horrors unfold in the mind’s eye. His words – his naming of the crimes – unfold as a penetrating form of aesthetic and political resistance as well as an act of healing.