MY MOM THE ANARCHIST

Format: Hybrid fiction/documentary animated feature (100 minutes) 


Director: Julie-Yara Atz 


Production: Imajack Films (Switzerland) 


Status: Screenplay development running in parallel with footage shot in Syria in 2025 
 

Distinction: Honorable mention at the Raindance 2025 pitching competition 

Confirmed support: Storylab Pour-cent Culturel Migros

WHEN THE OLD WORLD ENDS

After the fall of the ASSad regime in Syria, a daughter accompanies her mother on an unexpected return to Homs, navigating the ruins of a dictatorship through laughter, mythology, and the scorched reality of a city devoured by war. My Mom the Anarchist follows three generations of Syrian women each with their specific point of view, at a unique historical moment: when the old time is over and the new one has not yet begun.

The documentary strand carries the real and the intimate, while 2D animation connects memory to dream. It rebuilds what has disappeared, allowing imagination to bridge what the ruins defy us to comprehend.

returning to homs

Without anything to foreshadow it, the impossible happened: the ASSad regime, a 54-year dictatorship that ravaged Syria, fell. Caught off guard, I convinced my mother to go together, now that we could finally visit my grandmother. On the way, my mother struggles to make sense of what surrounds her: the soldiers are smiling, the walls once painted red are now green with the colors of the new flag. My mother chats with the taxi driver while I watch the leaning trees that had inhabited my childhood memories. Back then, I believed the dictatorship was so total that even the trees struggled to stand straight. Adulthood taught me it was only the wind. Some things, it turns out, bend for ordinary reasons. As we arrive in Homs, stunned and captivated by the murals on the walls, my mother no longer recognises the streets. There, tongues loosen and tell what danger had prevented people from saying for so long, separated bodies are reunited, previously inaccessible places are suddenly open to the public. One heart can barely hold the joy along with the immeasurable grief of all that was lost.

In Homs, everything seems so much smaller than I remembered, except my grandfather's library. My mother takes the opportunity to tell me about the liberation from the French Mandate, and I realise that for my grandmother, this is the second liberation in her lifetime. She tells me about her engagement in a house in Homs's old quarter, and when I visit the house I realise it too is in ruins, like nearly 80% of the city. My uncle keeps reminding us to watch our step – there could still be landmines. My mother tells me where the bathroom used to be, and the cockroaches she'd find there that terrified her. In my mind I reconstruct these different timelines, which contrast with the ruins around us. The ruins carry another layer entirely: during the siege, this building served as a makeshift hospital. On the floor, one can still find medication. And bones.

How to tell these different truths that coexist? The quantity of ruins defies all logic, so far beyond comprehension that only imagination can bridge it. The fear of all that could be can only be countered by dreams. 


The fracture

I began this project the way the Assad regime fell: overnight, without warning. I accompanied my mother on her first return to Homs in fifteen years, and I felt like I was in a dream. I filmed, to understand, to keep a trace, to prove to myself that this was really happening. Everything was surreal, starting with the fact that I could finally visit my teta (grandmother). My mom, for her part, had never imagined seeing Homs again. Over the years I had watched her fight tooth and nail against the dictatorship, organising the majority of demonstrations in front of the UN. She used to call Syria her "illness", like the situation there was eating her alive from the inside.

There, pain and fear coexist with hope, relief, and laughter. In her return, my mother embodied this capacity for laughter in a magnificent way. Laughter seems to allow her to inhabit the ruins without collapsing. I struggle to accept that we never manage to give my grandmother a proper bath. In winter, that requires enough water and electricity to heat her afterward - a luxury. I film my mother laughing at the broken intercom, at the elevator door you have to force open by hand. One day I forget my medication and my cousin tosses it down in a little bag from the fifth floor, nearly hitting a passerby. We laugh. But the bath stays with me.

Maybe laughter can scatter droplets of possibility, give us the strength to imagine what has never existed, and therefore to create it. A liberation creates a fracture, a glitch in the timeline: the old time is over, and the new one has not yet begun. It is precisely in that fracture that this film takes place, using images I filmed in that moment in time along with animation. Like Flee, the documentary strand carries the real and the intimate, while animation connects memory to dream. But where Flee reconstructs a past that could not be filmed, this film is present tense - shot in the fracture itself, before anyone knows what comes next. But in this long-hoped-for new Syria, something already divides us: my mom is intrinsically part of the new Syrian national project, and I am not. I was born of a civil marriage unrecognized by religious law. I am, and will remain, a foreigner in my own country.