Film Summary & Using This Guide

FILM SUMMARY

Mohamad Hafez received a one-way ticket to the United States. Missing his homeland, he decided to create a stand-in. A story of love, loss and creating pathways home.

USING THIS GUIDE

This guide is an invitation to dialogue. It is based on a belief in the power of human connection and designed for people who want to use A Broken House to engage family, friends, classmates, colleagues, and communities in conversation and understanding. In contrast to initiatives that foster debates in which participants try to convince others that they are right, this document envisions conversations undertaken in a spirit of openness in which people try to understand one another and expand their thinking by sharing viewpoints and actively listening.

The discussion prompts are intentionally crafted to help a wide range of audiences think more deeply about the issues in the film. Rather than attempting to address them all, choose one or two that best meet your needs and interests. And be sure to leave time to consider taking action. Planning next steps can help people leave the room feeling energized and optimistic, even in instances when conversations have been difficult.

For more detailed event planning and facilitation tips, visit https://communitynetwork.amdoc.org/.

To screen the film ahead of conversation you can stream it here.

A Letter from the Filmmaker, Jimmy Goldblum

I originally wanted to tell a story about refugees that my wife could watch. I had noticed a disturbing trend in this genre of films: documentarians were increasingly relying on graphic violence as a way to build empathy for the victims of conflict. These images are devastating and re-traumatizing to viewers like my wife, who developed c-PTSD while reporting on drone attack survivors in her home country of Pakistan. I wondered, for her and immigrant audiences like her, who deserved to see their stories told on-screen, what would it look like to create a film about the aftermath of war with neither blood nor bodies in it; to instead focus on the other things lost in conflict: our connection to our families, our culture, our ways of being in the world?

Then I met the architect Mohamad Hafez. I saw so much of myself in him. We’re both art and movie lovers, our parents shared similar professions; and we both grew up running around our neighborhoods with sketchbooks, living in the world of our doodles. The major difference between us is that Mohamad was born—according to George W. Bush and his NSEERS program —in the wrong type of country: Syria. For that reason, he was issued a single-entry visa to the United States and could no longer return home. He missed weddings, funerals, and births. He started to make miniatures as a way to soothe his homesickness; art therapy that he didn’t know was art therapy.

Mohamad’s lonely nostalgia turned to rage when the Syrian war broke out. He watched the thousand-year-old minarets, arches and porticoes that inspired him to become an architect— ancient doorways with their Hellenic, Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic influences—come crashing down. His world came crashing down with them: his family became refugees, fleeing to five countries amongst the six of them; and his parents eventually separated, unable to reconcile their competing attachments to Syria. And yet, Mohamad was one of the lucky ones: that, even as he endured the dissolution of the country he loved, he, along with his loved ones, survived.

I finished “A Broken House” a few months before the global pandemic forced us all inside for 18-months. As quarantine continued and we all missed weddings, funerals, and births, we experienced the slightest taste of Mohamad’s tragedy. But unlike Mohamad, travel bans have never prevented me from returning home; and I still have a home to which I can return.

This film asks, for those who survive war and arrive on our shores, what gets left behind? For Mohamad, all he has left of Syria and his family are memories. Damascus is irreparably changed, and our immigration laws have made it so, in the nearly two decades since Mohamad arrived in the United States, his once close-knit family has not been together under a single roof.

Even though they survived war and the life of a refugee without becoming another casualty or bloody statistic, this reality is agonizing, untenable, and yes, violent, enough.