Return to Homs: Sundance 2014 – first look review

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jan/23/return-to-homs-sundance-xan-brooks

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"This is Homs, but I don't know where I am," chuckles Basset, a rebel leader in the Free Syrian Army, struggling to get his bearings in a terra incognita of empty streets and bombed-out buildings. Teenaged Basset, we are told, was once ranked the second best goalkeeper in Syria; a star in the making who rejected the regime's overtures to fight for freedom instead. By the end of the film, however, he's something of a ruin himself.

Shot over two years in the city dubbed "the capital of the revolution", Talal Derki's harsh, jolting documentary traces the protesters' journey from pacifism to violence and finally towards martyrdom, the only ending they can envisage once the conflict turns against them. As Homs comes under siege, the liberated pockets become virtual prisons. The streets are unsafe, so the soldiers navigate the city like rodents, crawling through the sewers or scampering through deserted homes where the pictures still adorn the walls and television sets remain plugged in to the living-room sockets.

Derki's herky-jerky camera shows us the bodies in the road and the anguished relatives; the desperate battles and the makeshift medical centres (one, with grim irony, is named the Al-Assad Military Hospital). All around, the city of Homs is going to hell, its buildings reduced to dilapidated ash palaces, although here and there we catch fleeting glimpses of a woman on the road or an old man on a moped, suggesting that a few civilians are still clinging to a life inside the wreckage.

I would have liked to have learned more about these people, but it was not to be: Derki keeps his focus exclusively on the small band of rebels as their hope turns to despair. Is it crass to wish for a little more structure, context and analysis? The director's relentless, claustrophobic approach is surely an accurate reflection of the tragedy itself. There is no wider picture; the world has largely turned its back.

The movies at this year's Sundance festival are almost always rammed to the rafters. And yet, rather depressingly, the press and industry screening of Return to Homs is attended by about 20 delegates in total, at least eight of whom abscond before the closing credits. "Get this message to the world!" Basset shouts to Derki, as he waves his gun inside another ruined office block and contemplates his final stand.

• Full coverage of Sundance 2014