SYNOPSIS
The film begins with the search for Sahar, a twenty-two-year-old woman who fled domestic violence. Starting with a single, trembling phone call, it leads the audience on a journey to trace her remnants. Archival scenes from classic Egyptian films intersect with black-and-white landscapes of Jordan's desert, Dead Sea, and grasslands, summoning the traces left by misogyny and structural violence. Among fragmented testimonies and repeated silences, the unrecorded pain and erased lives of the disappeared are brought into sharp, unflinching focus.
REVIEW
A woman¡¯s trembling voice speaks of her fear. As we listen, the screen remains black—punctuated only by the sound of breath and brief flashes of light slicing through an impenetrable darkness. The film begins here, with the heinous crime often referred to as an ¡°honor killing,¡± embodied in the disappearance of Sahar, a young woman who fled domestic violence. To trace her path, director Helin Çelik speaks with those who knew Sahar. On the soundtrack, the director¡¯s questions alternate with the voices of her interviewees, and between these exchanges, the collective story of countless other missing women begins to emerge.
The camera returns again and again to sweeping grasslands, probing the surfaces of water and sand as if they, too, bear the absorption of vanished lives. Weaving the tangible with the spectral, HABĀ reveals the mechanisms by which structural violence erases both sight and sound. And yet, from within that erasure, it uncovers the gestures of resistance that insist on being seen and heard.
CONTACT
SIXPACKFILM
daniela@sixpackfilm.com