PEOPLE OF THE WASTELAND, A Film By Heba Khaled
PEOPLE OF THE WASTELAND depicts clashes with Syrian fighters on the front line with rare Go-Pro, first-person footage, exposing the chaos of war
For Your Consideration: Best Documentary Short
Directed by: Heba Khaled
Produced by: Talal Derki - 2019 Academy Award® Nominee,
Best Documentary Feature for Of Fathers and Sons
PEOPLE OF THE WASTELAND (“SOUKAAN AL-ARD AL-YABAAB”) is an award-winning experimental short film directed by Syrian-born filmmaker Heba Khaled. Her film depicts a first-person point-of-view perspective of clashes between Syrian fighters on the front line. In the chaos of war, the lines between right and wrong become blurred. This rare Go-Pro footage from inside war aims to remind us that in a territory where the landscape and the people are ephemeral because of war, only the camera can remain alive, and only the image of a certain moment can remain eternal.
PEOPLE OF THE WASTELAND had its World Premiere at Thessaloniki Documentary Festival (Greece), and has also picked up many awards on the festival circuit this past year including the Pax Diversity Award at Diversions International Short Film Festival (Croatia), the First International Danzante Award at Festival International De Cine De Huesca (Spain), Jury Special Mention at One Shot International Short Film Festival (Armenia), Special Mention - Director at 1st International Film Festival of Sriganganagar (India), the “Sliced Onion” Award for Best Short Film at Makedox Festival (Macedonia) and the Grand Prix for Best Short at Berlin Liberi Film Festival (Germany).
Khaled, through her connection to many cameramen on the ground in Syria whom she knew through her work at Thomson Reuters, where she had worked undercover as a reporter and producer, helped her to collect some of the footage. Additional footage was collected by producer Derki in Syria while he was shooting his previous film Of Fathers and Sons, and footage from the main cameraman (which is seen at the beginning of the film), was also sent to her. The footage was sent to Khaled in Berlin, where she took the material to form a story and ultimately edited it down to 21 minutes with editor Alex Bakri. In total there were six different fighters whose footage was used in the short film. They seamlessly edited the footage together to give the viewer the look and feel as if there was only one cameraman.
The film is a trip inside the heart and front line of the war in Syria. As the film’s viewer, the audience becomes the character. The fighters were mostly Jihadists who were working under the command of Turkey’s President Erdoğan. About 80% or possibly all of these fighters were killed in the war. They were fighting against the Kurds as well as against the Syrian army, but the film keeps their background and affiliations vague. Artistically and aesthetically, Khaled’s intention is to not make it clear to the viewer what side they are on or who they are fighting for. “As a female filmmaker, it was impossible for me to be there to film this. It was very urgent to learn how men and masculinity controls radicalism, and this experience at the moment of killing in a war, and to transfer it in a cinematic way through my own eyes, mind and heart,” said Khaled.
Derki is Kurdish and originally from Damascus. He married Khaled in 2011, and they moved to Berlin in 2014. Khaled is from Ghouta in Southwestern Syria. She lost 20 relatives from bombings, fightings and prisons in the war. “When I was in Syria for the first three years of the war, I believed that the people had the right to carry weapons to protect themselves. But now I regret that feeling. I spent 25 years in a very similar conservative area of the land you see in the film. My childhood memories, my town, everything about it has been totally destroyed,” she said.
“Much like in a first-person shooting video game, the humans are a tool of destruction. In a video game, you feel no sympathy. My film is a statement against the war and the violence and asks the question, ‘why do we kill?’ It’s the global idea that in war itself, you are both the murderer and the victim. There is no holy war. All wars are the same,” she said.
Heba Khaled - Director/Writer
Heba Khaled was born in Damascus in 1986 and studied Arabic Literature at Damascus University. She worked as a radio commentator and as a freelance fixer for CNN, Al Arabiya and Reuters in Damascus and Beirut between 2011 and 2013, and also worked as a writer and executive producer on these and other Arab media channels. In 2014, she started collecting footage for her first short-film People of the Wasteland. The same year, she moved to Berlin where she assisted the filmmaker Talal Derki in the direction of his film Of Fathers and Sons, which won the Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Grand Jury Prize in 2018 and the Oscar® nomination for Best Documentary Feature in 2019.
Talal Derki - Producer
Talal Derki was born in Damascus and has been based in Berlin since 2014. He studied
directing in Athens. Before making his own films, Derki worked as an assistant director on many feature film productions and as producer and co-producer for Big Skills developing film projects. He has also worked as a director for various Arab TV programs, and as a freelance cameraman for CNN and Thomson Reuters. Derki’s short films and feature-length documentaries have received more than 100 international awards as director and producer including the Grand Jury Prize for World Documentary for both Return to Homs (2014) and Of Fathers and Sons (2018), which received an Oscar® nomination for Best Documentary Feature in 2019, and also won a “Lola” from the German Academy Awards® in 2019. He has also served as a jury member for many film festivals.
PEOPLE OF THE WASTELAND Credits:
Director/Writer - Heba Khaled
Producer: Talal Derki
Production Companies: Jouzour Film Production UGmbH (Germany), Cinema Group Production (Syria)
Director of Photography: Ahmad Nasser
Sound: Ansgar Frerich
Editor: Alex Bakri
Color Grading: Moritz Peters
Sound Design: Fabian Weigmann
Music: Muhammad Bazz
Germany/Syria - 2019 - 21 minutes - HD - Color - Arabic with English subtitles
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