IFF and React to Film show the faces of the Syrian refugee crisis in “After Spring”
On Monday, October 24 in Brown University’s Granoff Auditorium, Ivy Film Festival and React to Film held a screening of the documentary After Spring, followed by a panel including Brown professors Carl Saab and Jennifer Johnson and Rhode Island State Representative Aaron Regunberg.
After Spring, directed by Steph Ching and Ellen Martinez and executive produced by Jon Stewart, follows the Syrian refugee crisis in the Zaatari camp in Jordan. Ching and Martinez each have their own personal relations to the subject matter that compelled them to make this film. Martinez attended high school in Damascus, Syria and lived in the Middle East for a little under a decade. Ching, though not as directly connected to the region, felt a deeper connection to the stories of these refugees in part because her own grandmother was a refugee in China during the end of World War II. Once she was in the Zaatari camp, Ching began to realize the parallels between the tales of the Syrian refugees and the stories her grandma would tell her when she was young.
An official selection of the Tribeca Film Festival 2016 and a recipient of a 2016 MacArthur Documentary Film Grant, After Spring centers on the lives of two refugee families and an aid worker. Rather than attempting to illustrate the crisis in general with news footage and data, the film uses personal stories of everyday life in the camp to show the emotional core of this disaster.
As Martinez told IndieWire earlier this year, she was dissatisfied with the media’s portrayal of the Syrian refugee crisis. It was depicted as an impersonal, political disaster, not as something that was affecting the lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals and their families. After Spring combats this distant and withdrawn treatment of the situation by humanizing the crisis, providing us with faces and voices behind the headlines.
Zaatari camp is home to nearly 80,000 refugees and is the largest camp for Syrian refugees. As this refugee crisis enters its sixth year, families continue to be separated from their homes, confined to living spaces once thought to be temporary.
In the film, we move through time with the families of Abu Ibrahim and Mohammed, and we see the children of the camp find a means of coping with such persistent hardship through Taekwondo. Additionally, the film follows Maram, an aid worker, in her day-to-day trials of attending to the needs of thousands of people with extremely limited resources.
The panel brought a number of diverse perspectives to speak about the film and the refugee crisis in Syria. Carl Saab, a PhD neuroscientist at Brown and researcher of neurological disorders, has himself visited the Zaatari camp with a group from the Brown community to evaluate the mental health of children in the camp. He provided both the firsthand perspective of someone who has been on the ground in Zaatari and a scientific viewpoint. Saab spoke about the effects of stress on the development of children in the camp and emphasized the power of resilience so apparent in the documentary. Born and raised in Lebanon, Saab shared his thoughts on the attitudes of many refugees throughout the world. “The psyche of the refugee is to never believe this is permanent,” Saab said. “It never really settles in.”
Aaron Regunberg, a Brown graduate and Rhode Island State Representative, recently signed a letter along with a number of government officials that committed his support to Muslims and immigrants who deal with continuous prejudice in their own neighborhoods. In 2015, Regunberg pushed Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo to keep the state open to Syrian refugees after she was discouraged by some in light of the terrorist attacks in Paris. Regunberg condemned the intolerance and bigotry directed at refugees during times of increased fear of terror. During the panel, Regunberg said, “These folks have so much to bring to our state, our society, our economy.”
Jennifer Johnson, a Brown professor and historian of Africa who specializes in 20th century North Africa, praised the film for its attention to the daily lives of refugees and for the humanity it provided them. When members of the audience asked how they could do their part to help, Johnson brought up the social media presence of the camp, particularly Zaatari camp’s twitter, and the way it gives the public access to information. Students can use their own social media, she said, to spread the message and aid in fundraising. Brown students can also get involved through BRYTE, a refugee tutoring and mentoring program.
The panel provided a variety of resources and information for attendees, many of whom were eager to find to ways to get involved and help ease the plight of those who have been involuntarily displaced. The faces on the screen spoke volumes more than any statistic, and that is just what After Spring set out to do.
