Arina Adju - 'All roads lead to Afrin'
Screening of the documentary 'All roads lead to Afrin' about a young woman who visits her father to meet his
new family in Syria, on the other side of the thin line between
war and peace.
Thursday 15 December 2022, 17:00-19:00
Location: Stroom, Hogewal 1-9, The Hague
Entry: free
Stroom Den Haag gladly offers the podium to Arina Adju, a young Russian documentary filmmaker. With All roads lead to Afrin (35 min, 2016, Torch Films, USA) she tells the story of a young woman who visits her father to meet his new family in Afrin, Syria, on the other side of the thin line between war and peace.
Arina Adju will give a short introduction to her film. After the screening there will be a Q & A with Alexandra Landré, artistic director of Stroom, and ample time for a talk with the public.
"A Russian girl, a Kurdish father. The father lives in Syria, in a town near the Turkish border. The girl joins him to meet her new family and... to find her lost roots. Everything moves forward in fragments, of time and of space. It is not only an aesthetic choice. It is a form consistent with the state of war, with the fragility of existences, with the capturing of reality by the body and by the spirit. But everything moves forward, in its way, carried along by a painful energy that obstinately perforates the borders. The strength of this film is its fragility, its being made of everything and of nothing, its being attached to a thread, that of the breathing of the person who is filming, who is carrying it on her shoulders, as is often the case in the life of people living in exile. Here therefore is a film built like a personal diary: a hybrid film, which weaves together the paths of two impossible returns, but also a moving film of tremulous beauty, pierced by moments of savage grace, which suddenly appear from nowhere."
- Luciano Barisone, film critic, director of international film festival Visions du Réel
Shortly after the outbreak of the war with Ukraine Arina Adju (Moscow, 1996) fled Russia and is currently residing at Stroom Den Haag. Stroom is part of the global network of Artists at Risk that assists, relocates and funds artists and art practitioners who are at risk of persecution or oppression, or are fleeing war or terror.
Adju graduated in 2015 from The Marina Razbezhkina and Mikhail Ugarov School of Documentary Film and Theatre, participated in IDFA Academy and collaborated a.o. with Torch Films (USA), Triptyque films (France). Adju has since released a number of films concentrating on topics such as self-gender identification, national identification, war influences on a person's life and society. At the moment Adju works on a feature length documentary A time to get and a time to lose. Set across Russia, Syria and the Netherlands, this film sees a daughter's inexhaustible attempts to reconnect with her Syrian father who is stuck in between worlds, in a limbo of exile. A film about the consequences of leaving one's homeland for a so-called better life. Another project Message across the sea, is shot in Istanbul and refers to a historical figure of the 16th century, Hurrem Sultan or Roksolana, who is originally from Ukraine.
Azdhu: "In the residency in Stroom I've been inspired to have an idea of an installation reflecting on the current situation of Russian invasion of Ukraine, on censorship and laws forbidden to talk about the war in Russia and on my experience of being an emigrant."