Fleeing The War
The documentary Fleeing The War is a directorial debut by Maria Ivanova.
The project was filmed in Germany, Russia, Lebanon and Syria. Written by Oleg Kolin Co-Director: Nikolai Viktorov Fleeing The War premiered at Russian Film Festival in Lebanon organized by Buta Films in cooperation with Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Russian premiere took place on 20th of June 2017 (International Refugee Day) in cooperation with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Russia. In the fall of 2017 we organized a screening with Q&A session at Red Cross office in Moscow. The film received a special prize from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Russia at Stalker Film Festival.
Synopsis
The war in the Middle East has become a far bigger event than a local social and religious conflict. It suddenly turned out that this strange war in which Arabs kill Arabs concerns everybody. Sated Europe understood it when thousands of refugees flooded in its territory. Suddenly there appeared a great number of them. A frightening number of them.
Refugees became sort of rebuke for European snobbism and ignorance, as well as the warning of a global danger and a reminder of geopolitical mistakes, a durability test for Christian values such as understanding, compassion and selflessness.
The average citizen just recently acknowledged Muslim world, however he hasn’t yet gathered a courage to look beyond the surface. The first reaction to all of it is fear. Muslims are the danger, an enemy. We aim to help getting to know this unknown, heterogeneous and complicated Muslim world without prejudices.
The global problem is daily being discussed by high rank men in governments and diplomatic missions, but these politicians are not interested in small men, who have fled their destroyed country. A small man won’t be the center of public attention. He’s destined to live day by day in his personal hell.
The goal of our project is to show a small man’s destiny with a global tragedy in the background. This small man is not a terrorist or a thug – he doesn’t destroy civilization. Terrorists under the passive eye of the Old and New Worlds don’t erect Muslim world, but destroy it. A small man from the Middle East is a broken piece of the Muslim world needs help. He wants to live and not to be afraid for his children’s lives. That is why he leaves his family, crosses the sea in a small boat, commits a crime buying a false document, gives all his saving to bandits, walks on foot for weeks and climbs over camp fences. Small man is a peasant or a teacher, or a small salesman. It can be a thirteen-year-old teenager or a mother with many children.
With our film we would like to remind you how small is the difference between a political intrigue and cold-blooded extermination of people. We want to see a human life as a main value, not money, short political profit or religious views.