Little Palestine/ Syrian Doc Days

People in the sealed-off Yarmuk refugee camp assert their humanity in the Syrian civil war despite hunger and lack of prospects, while the humanitarian world remains on the sidelines. When a small street choir sings to piano accompaniment and the noise of bombs, their song joins the sad chorale of similar sieges in world history.

The district of Yarmouk (Damascus, Syria) sheltered the biggest Palestinian refugee camp in the world from 1957 to 2018.</p> <p>When the Syrian revolution broke out, the regime of Bashar Al-Assad saw Yarmouk as a refuge of rebels and resistance and set up a siege from 2013 on. Gradually deprived of food, medicine and electricity, Yarmouk was cut off from the rest of the world.</p> <p>Abdallah Al-Khatib was born in Yarmouk and lived there until his expulsion by Daesh in 2015. Between 2011 and 2015, he and his friends documented the daily life of the besieged inhabitants, who decided to face bombing, displacement and hunger with rallying, study, music, love and joy.</p> <p>Hundreds of lives were irredeemably transformed by war and siege – from Abdallah’s mother, who turned into a nurse taking care of the elderly at the camp, to the fiercest activists whose passion for Palestine got gradually undermined by hunger…