One of the striking features of many realistic films and books about war is the overwhelming boredom and confusion that soldiers experience. In All Quiet on the Western Front, the German troops never know where they are or where they’re going and spend long stretches behind the front with nothing at all to do. In Amos Gitai’s film, Kippur, we get a similar sense of soldiers not knowing where they’re supposed to be and spending endless hours sitting around waiting for something to happen. Beneath the boredom is an ever-present fear of what lies ahead.
In Simple as Water, the documentary directed by Oscar winner Megan Mylan and produced by Mylan and Robin Hessman, we see a first hand account of a similar sort of endless waiting experienced by civilians whose lives and families have been torn apart by the Syrian civil war. In each of the film’s five stories, we see family members who spend months and years waiting. Waiting years for word from a son who’s gone off to fight, waiting for the right papers that will allow a family to reunite, waiting to hear about one’s asylum status. In every case, those involved only barely understand the processes by which their futures will be decided, and live in fear that the Kafkaesque machinery will rule against them.
In the midst of all this waiting, there are some things that cannot wait. Moms must go to work and kids need someone to put their socks on. And with the men gone, the responsibility for parenting often falls to the eldest child. As one mom tells her husband over a video call, “Our eight year old son has to bear the responsibilities of a 40 year old man.” When many in the west have no direct experience of war, it is these little, highly relatable, moments that make this film so important.
The film does not get into the politics of the Syrian civil war. Nor is it a commentary on the refugee resettlement programs in the various countries in which the displaced families find themselves. The film is more of a meditation on the enormous strain on the family bonds of those who’ve been displaced by war. In this, it’s as timeless as it is timely.
Hopefully, the effect of the film will be to give some perspective on the flood of Syrian refugees and the sadly inevitable future waves of similar refugees. The now decade old conflict in Syria has produced millions of refugees. And those refugees have faced backlashes and closed doors in the Arab world, Europe and the United States. In the latter, as CNN reported in 2015, more than half of US governors have said that Syrian refugees are not welcome in their states. There are fears that some refugees will turn out to be violent criminals or, in Canada’s case, that the refugees will be ‘pampered.’ In the film we learn that many of these refugees are not desperate to settle in Germany or Greece. They want to be reunited with their families and one day return to Syria.
The story of the Al Kadad family bookends the film. We begin with Yasmin who is living in the Piraeus, the port of Athens, in a tent with several children. They play amongst the taxis and huge ferries. We soon learn that in their attempts to escape, Yasmin lost one of her children. Her husband, Safwan, had left earlier and found himself in Germany. As Yasmin’s children play in the Mediterranean, we can’t help but remember the shocking and haunting image of 3-year old Alan Kurdi lying dead on a similar beach after his family tried to flee Syria.
When we do see a family reunited, the beaming children’s smiles at their father evoke both joy, but also a profound sadness for the children who, like Kurdi, will never again see their mothers or fathers. And this brings us to one of the awful truths about so many modern conflicts. It is not only the soldiers whose lives are destroyed by civil war. The woman living in a tent with her children, the 20 something man taking care of a little brother who’s leg was lost in a bombing, the mother who spends her days frantically trying to find out about troop movements on the front and prisoner exchanges to discover the location of her son.
If one of the goals of this film is to open a window onto the complex and often impossible situation many Syrian refugees face, it is an absolute success.
© 2021. UniversalCinema Mag.