As part of the Refugee Week 2025, Qisetna has partnered with Kensington Central Library, in London for a unique film screening on June 19th at 6 pm. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the director of Wind Cinema, Ahmad AlHaj and the filmmakers.
Please book your ticket here.
A selection of Syrian short films exploring different layers of the refugee experience. Each film offers a unique entry point into themes of survival, memory, storytelling and emotional legacy. Together, they create an arc that moves from grounded reality to intimate reflection.
In the film Anxiety (2023), a young refugee, adrift in a foreign land, grapples with the alien weight of the German tongue — each word a labyrinth, each sentence a threshold he must cross alone. Around him, the machinery of bureaucracy grinds with impersonal precision, inundating him with an endless tide of official letters — stark, cold missives that stir the ashes of old wars and awaken shadows long buried.
Every envelope becomes a summons. Every seal, a portent.
The film directed by Alshafei Abai, shows how the world of this young man begins to tremble at the edges.
Between the rigid symbols of institutional language and the fluid echoes of memory, the boundary between the real and the imagined begins to dissolve. Is the threat outside, or does it breathe from within?
And as the paper walls close in, one question haunts him like a ghost:
What remains real when the mind must rewrite the world to survive it?
In the windswept border town of Arsal, Lebanon, My Land is Burned (2024) casts light upon the fragile lives of Syrian refugee children and their families, caught between the ashes of what was and the uncertainty of what may come. Their days unfold beneath the weight of loss, displacement, and silent endurance—each moment a quiet negotiation with exile.
Yet within this landscape of hardship, a different story breathes.
PROGRAM A – Refugee awareness month
This film offers a grounded and emotionally honest way to begin the screening. It invites the audience to witness the reality of exile through the perspective of children, without dramatising it. It brings forward the long-term effects of displacement while highlighting the quiet strength of community, care, and education in a setting where institutions have withdrawn.
Beneath the dust and sorrow, something begins to stir: the possibility of a generation not shaped by ruin,
but by the unwavering faith of those who choose to believe in their becoming.
Mona (2023), a Syrian mother of two children, struggles to protect her daughters from tradition and old-fashioned social issues in Belgium. a Syrian mother of two children, struggles to protect her daughters from tradition and old-fashioned social issues in Belgium.
Place: Kensington Central Library, 12 Phillimore Walk, London W8 7RX
