Impressions of a flat, only a few things are captured. A drive on the backseat of a car. One can only suspect that there is an outside. A shadow on the carpet that belongs to another flat. This place is safer. There is a balcony over whose balustrade one had better not look. The woman behind the camera is glimpsed in the reflections on the windowpane. Shots ring out frequently. They say a kiosk was bombed. No, two. They say the Free Syrian Army is building a barrier in front of the house one had to leave behind along with one’s past, dreams and hope. The fear grows “every day”. Everybody knew that Syria was free, would stay free and never accepted any dictatorship, the TV set announces.
In her video diary Reem Karssli paints the sensitive portrait of a family whose members must cope with reality in very individual ways “every day”, a reality “even harsher, uglier” than what the camera is able to capture. A rare document, powerful in its extreme immediacy, which only a miracle could have brought out of this flat.

Claudia Lehmann

The face and voice of a young Syrian fighter. The left half of his face is in deep shadow. We hear a story, still glowing with the remembrance of an interrogation at which he was consulted as a specialist. His words and sentences are delivered haltingly, gravely. The first sentence, after he has collected himself smoking, head bowed and eyes closed: “I killed.” He is convinced that the man he shot at the end of the interrogation was innocent. But the ten men who were present at the interrogation had already pre-condemned the suspect, just wanted their judgement legitimised. What should have been an ordinary assignment became within a few long minutes a test of the young man’s humanity, which he feels he has failed. This is the failure that “Of God and Dogs” examines as it swells to a great filmic requiem: unreconciled, masterful, despairing.
Ralph Eue