Layn

Everything begins in Beirut, when the storyteller’s father reads a manuscript in Aramean, before singing in Turkish. The filmmaker’s grandmother remembers what happened in Mardin, the ancient Mesopotamian city where a host of different religions coexisted, at the time of the First World War. The Syriac-speaking Christians and the Armenians shared the same tragic fate. The story of a lost place and dispersed families takes the film from the Lebanon to Syria, from Turkey to Germany and Belgium. This is also a journey into the Aramean, Turkish, Arabic, German and French languages, guided by the texts and chronicles from a world engulfed. The journey builds up a land for the storyteller’s that he could finally inhabit, he who often feels he is “neither in the right place nor at the right time”. In the Mardin dialect “layn” means “where to”.