With 22 million people forced to leave their countries and more than 6 million children still living in war zones, the Syrian conflict represents after 12 years the biggest humanitarian crisis of our times. With Shukran [+], in Italian theatres on 8, 9 and 10 July through Eagle Pictures, Italian director Pietro Malegori has added another piece to the great mosaic that cinema has tried to compose throughout these years about the Syrian civil war –or revolution– and more generally about Arab springs and winters. Inspired by real events, Malegori tells an episode out of a thousand, paying homage to who “tries to make a difference”, a concept that could be applied to all ongoing conflicts, in which it is essential that the duty to fight and not surrender prevail.
Shukran (“thank you” in Arabic) begins with the off-screen voice of Jala (French-Algerian actress Camélia Jordana), a perfusionist (she controls the equipment that allow extracorporeal circulation during an operation) who talks about her encounter with heart surgeon Taher Hailar (Shahab Hosseini) at the Damascus paediatric hospital, one of the few infrastructures still standing. The point of view is therefore that of a woman, a mother who, we discover, has lost a child in the conflict. Nevertheless, Jala remains a marginal character in the story. The film focuses on the tormented doctor. It is Taher who says no to his older brother Ali, who works with the “White Helmets” (the Syrian humanitarian civil protection organisation), who suggests accompanying him on a dangerous journey to Binnish, in the zone controlled by Jabhat al-Nusra jihadists, to rescue a child with heart disease, Mohamed. Having set out alone, Ali was the victim of a suicide attack at a checkpoint, carried out by little Mohamed’s father.
A series of flashbacks throughout the film reconstructs the rapport between the two brothers, sons of a high ranking army officer, from the moments when as children they had saved an Israeli pilot from the sea, fed and hid him (a “muqatil”, the enemy par excellence), an episode that in a way had revealed the difference between their respective visions of the world and sealed their fates. Also driven by a sense of guilt, Taher comes out of his bubble – the hospital where, due to a lack of oxygen supply, he has to decide who to save day after day – and goes to accomplish what his murdered brother had intended. On his trip, he is accompanied by an old man from the terrorist front area, whose wife was killed by the army that was repressing peaceful protests against President Bashar Assad in the spring of 2011.
The painful and anguished performance of Iranian actor Shahab Hosseini, who has acted for Asghar Farhadi in three films (About Elly, A Separation, The Salesman [+]), represents undoubtedly the backbone of the film, despite a script too linear and with a few excessive rhetorical emphases. The direction clearly suffers from a lack of a more adequate budget and while the scenes of surgical interventions are excellent, the exteriors in more “action” situations (the suicide attack, the helicopter attack with gas) are less efficient, despite the maintained pathos (the photography is by Tommaso Fiorilli). A powerful first film with emotional involvement, commitment and civil passion that one would have nevertheless preferred more personal.
Shukran is an Italian-French co-production by Addictive Ideas, with 3 Marys Entertainment, Frame by Frame and Rosebud Entertainment Pictures.