Coming of age under fire: 5 Seasons of Revolution

SYRIA / Under bombs, an aspiring video journalist finds herself facing self-reckoning as the unexpected narrator of her own destiny. Until the Putin regime launched a reign of terror upon its neighbour, the ongoing civil war in Syria was perhaps the most documented conflict in recent (western) media. This inevitably made it prone to the usual dumbed-down, foreign-lensed tropes: Baddie Bashar propped up by the aforementioned baddie while launching his own parallel reign of terror against a Syrian populace longing to be free. But what happens when the lens gets widened to include Damascus’s rather prosperous and intact urban base in addition to the bombed-out and struggling cities of Homs and Aleppo? What happens when the picture shows a still bustling capital filled with folks who would just as soon get on with their middle-class lives and look away? Until, also inevitably, they can’t. Luckily, we have Lina (who, for safety reasons, goes only by her first name) and her stunning Sundance debut, 5 Seasons of Revolution, which brings an unexpectedly new perspective to a decade-plus-old story.

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