Big Sky to screen ‘Aleppo: The Silence of the War’

Iranian-Syrian doc ‘Aleppo: The Silence of the War’ has been selected to go on screen at the 16th edition of the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in the US.

Directed by Amir Osanlou, the 29-minute documentary is a poetic narration of war and its ruins as well as the deadly silence that afflicts the city of Aleppo as the most prosperous city of Syria in not so long ago.

The 30-min documentary shows a ghost town where no human life is seen, but only rusty swings, car wrecks in the courtyard, and collapsed buildings everywhere that heighten the sense of desolation in these images of destruction.

The Big Sky website introduces the Iranian doc with “Our daily life is full of voices that most of us do not hear because of repetition, as if they no longer exist. Sounds of car bug, car radio sound, traffic jerky voice, children’s voice, and bird sounds that read every morning to inform us from the beginning of the day.”

“But in Aleppo, people were accustomed to the sounds of war, rockets, and mortars, to the sound of the mother’s cries and the cry of the fathers, break the glass and destroy the houses. Now the war is over and everything is drowned in silence and wind. Silence is as eternal as is full of fear and loneliness,” it adds.

‘Aleppo: The Silence of the War’, full of stories buried under the rubble, depicts this fragile silence after the war; the silence from years of war; a silence that does not mean peace, nor the meaning of war.

The doc has so far gone on screen at some global events, including the 2018 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

The Big Sky Documentary Film Festival is the premier venue for non-fiction film in the American West. It offers an ideal setting for filmmakers to premiere new work and develop lasting relationships with fellow filmmakers and industry.

The festival draws an audience of 20,000 and film entries from every corner of the globe to a uniquely intimate mountain town setting with a local Montana flavor.

The 16th annual festival will take place on February 15-24, 2019 in downtown Missoula, Montana, the US.

MG/MG