Arina Adju - 'All roads lead to Afrin’ at Stroom

• Date: 15 December
• label.tijd 17:00 - 19:00
• Location: Stroom

Stroom Den Haag welcomes Arina Adju to the stage. Adju is a young Russian documentary maker. With All roads lead to Afrin (35 mins, 2016, Torch Films, US), she tells the story of a young woman who is visiting her father

Stroom Den Haag gladly offers the podium to Arina Adju, a young Russian documentary filmmaker. With All roads lead to Afrin she tells the story of a young woman visiting her father to meet his new family in Afrin, Syria, on the other side of the thin line between war and peace.

Arina Adju will give a short introduction to her film. After the screening, there will be a Q & A with Alexandra Landré, director of Stroom, and ample time for a talk with the public.

"A Russian girl, a Kurdish father. The father lives in Syria, in a town near the Turkish border. The girl joins him to meet her new family and ... to find her lost roots. Everything moves forward in fragments, of time and of space. It is not only an aesthetic choice. It is a form consistent with the state of war, with the fragility of existences, with the capturing of reality by the body and by the spirit. But everything moves forward, in its way, carried along by a painful energy that obstinately perforates the borders. The strength of this film is its fragility, its being made of everything and of nothing, its being attached to a thread, that of the breathing of the person who is filming, who is carrying it on her shoulders, as is often the case in the life of people living in exile. Here therefore is a film built like a personal diary: a hybrid film, which weaves together the paths of two impossible returns, but also a moving film of tremulous beauty, pierced by moments of savage grace, which suddenly appear from nowhere."

• Luciano Barisone, film critic, director of international film festival Visions du Réel’

This movie is in English.

Entry is free.

For more information, click here.

About the Filmmaker

Shorty after the outbreak of the war with Ukraine, Arina Adju fled from Russia and is momentarily staying with Stroom Den Haag. Stroom is part of the global network of Artists at Risk, which helps artists who are fleeing war or terror or who are at risk for persecution or oppression.

Adju graduated in 2015 from The Marina Razbezhkina and Mikhail Ugarov School of Documentary Film and Theatre, participated in IDFA Academy and collaborated a.o. with Torch Films (USA), Triptyque films (France). Adju has since released a number of films concentrating on topics such as self-gender identification, national identification, and the influences of war on a person's life and society.

At the moment, Adju is working on a feature-length documentary A time to get and a time to lose. Set across Russia, Syria, and the Netherlands, this film sees a daughter's inexhaustible attempts to reconnect with her Syrian father who is stuck in between worlds, in a limbo of exile. A film about the consequences of leaving one's homeland for a so-called better life. Another project Message across the sea, is shot in Istanbul and refers to a historical figure of the 16th century, Hurrem Sultan or Roksolana, who is originally from Ukraine.

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