‘Background’: FIDMarseille Review

Dir/scr: Khaled Abdulwahed. Germany. 2023. 64mins

Memory becomes the most precious link between a son and his elderly father in Background. The latest documentary from Khaled Abdulwahed is an imaginative, highly personal attempt to pinpoint the human connections in the wider sweep of history. An intimate, poignant work should find a welcome at further festivals, especially with the profile-boosting Grand Prize win in the International Competition at FIDMarseille, where the film held its world premiere.

An intimate, poignant work

The Syrian-born Abdulwahed is now a refugee living in Berlin, and his short film Backyard (2018) and feature Purple Sea (2020) have explored exile, flight and memory. He begins Background with images of a camera being cleaned and polished – signalling, perhaps, his search for a clearer, sharper perspective. He shows a constant interest in process and technique. The soundtrack crackles and hums before we hear a querulous “hello” uttered by his father Sadallah in Aleppo; he seems very far away.

Conversations with his father provide the spine of the film as Sadallah recalls his time as a foreign exchange student in the German Democratic Republic during the late 1950s. He remembers a journey from Aleppo on the Orient Express that took him through Istanbul to the Balkans, Greece and Vienna. He then spent a year in Leipzig learning English, before studying chemical engineering in Dresden and Merseburg. It was a time of openness and opportunity.

The audio recording of his father’s memories plays out against plaintive images of the life Abdulwahed can see from his Berlin apartment window. Snow swirls in the sky and then settles to silence the noise of city life. A train cuts through the night. A plume of smoke ascends from a chimney, birds hop along a wall. The first light of dawn prods the day into wakefulness.

The phone connection with his father can be fragile and often breaks. It means his story is served up in little pieces of time, like a jigsaw that Abdulwahed is left to assemble. Abdulwahed is sent some old photos of his father, which he digitises, and his attempt to verify and follow his father’s past involves a degree of detective work and the use of archives, documents and Google. Abdulwahed also takes photos of places that were significant during his father’s years in Europe, and then inserts the digital images of his father into those pictures; so reclaiming history and making the narrative his own. There is something Zelig-like about the process, creating images of events that happened 60 years earlier but were not captured at the time. It is a manufacturing of a historical record that is manipulative, but in the service of an emotion that is genuine. 

The frail Sadallah chuckles at memories of the past, but we also hear him wheeze and cough. His health is failing and there seems no obvious means of getting him out of Syria. The few, precious photos he sends to Abdulwahed allows him to see his father as a young, handsome man with a full head of hair. The images that he subsequently creates gives him a much more extensive, precious family album. There is little discussion of the situation in Aleppo but we can hear bombs exploding in the background; the knowledge that this pair may never see each other again only adds to the film’s emotional impact.

Running just over an hour, Background is compact and involving and never overstays its welcome. We are not shown a contemporary photo of Sadallah and we rarely catch a glimpse of Abdulwahed. Instead, we gain a sense of Abdulwahed through his painstaking approach to the task he sets himself of chasing down facts, processing and editing photos. In the end, what matters is the way two generations can escape the present by losing themselves in the past and how they find solace in the embrace of memory.