VERDICT: Antoine Chapon repurposes eerie architectural animations in 'The Orchards', a paean to a lost Damascus community that attempts to resist its eradication by a vindictive regime.
The now demolished district of Al Basateen is brought back to life in The Orchards.
In 2011, during the Syrian revolution, the Al Basateen neighbourhood of Damascus protested and resisted just like all of the others. Covering a vast area and furnished with beautiful orchards, it was a difficult place for the regime to exert control, so they resorted to massacring the residents and razing the district. They planned to replace it with Marota City, a clinical new smart city of skyscrapers and order. In this multivalent documentary, Antoine Chapon pays homage to what was destroyed and the people who can still hear the sounds of a place wiped away by those in power.
“Pomegranates, mulberry trees, the most beautiful prickly pears…” says on voiceover, remembering the famous orchards of Al Basateen. The fruit trees were a defining feature of the area, uprooted to be replaced by useless palms. Chapon uses architectural 3D modelling to present the sanitised vision, an empty cityscape free from troublesome residents, free from the history and society that might inspire resistance. He intercuts these cold images with interviews, and grainy phone-captured footage of the district before it was demolished, or bulldozers during the act.
One woman stares at an overhead map of the enormous, sandy building site, seeing in the ghostly images of where she and her family lived. In another sequence she walks around an approximation of her home, created with tape on a warehouse floor – a modest house, decimated in the name of control. These conversations, and the voiceover recollections of Al Basateen serve to highlight how sterile this new world would be. As alien palms sway in computer-generated breeze, people sit at computers created a newly rendered version of his future – one covered in colourful political graffiti, where the famous old vegetation begins its reclamation. The people and plants refuse to be erased, they refuse to forget. Al Basateen lives on, regardless.
Director, screenplay, animation: Antoine Chapon
Producers: Thomas Hakim, Julien Graff Cinematography: Juliette Barrat
Editing: Laura Rius Aran, Antoine Chapon
Sound: Ryo Baldet
Music: Hareth Mhedi Production company: Petit Chaos (France)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (European Shorts) In Arabic 23 minutes
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