A film by Ammar Aziz
Duration: 81 minutes, 2015, Urdu, Pashto with English Subtitles
An elderly man living in the Jalozai refugee camp feels desperately nostalgic and longs to go home. A grandfather, poet and former teacher, he finds himself internally displaced as a result of the ongoing conflict between the Pakistani Army and the Taliban. Life inside the camp is no life at all—it's a place where people cease to be human beings and become stories instead. This man tells his story over and over again to stay intact and pierce his numbing loss. He "left himself behind" and so is torn between the past, the insecure present and the bleak future. As he struggles to decide whether to leave his family and risk returning to his distant homeland, he must confront the prospect that home may no longer exist in physical space and may now be only a place of make-believe, a mirage in his mind.
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Ammar Aziz
Ammar Aziz is a FIPRESCI winning and IDFA nominated documentary filmmaker based in Lahore, Pakistan. He has travelled to film festivals in over 70 countries including regions such as Iraq and Turkish Kurdistan and media outlets such as Deutsche Welle, Christian Science Monitor and The Hindu have written about his work. His feature documentary film A Walnut Tree had its world premiere and was in competition for first appearance at the world’s largest documentary festival, IDFA, in 2015. The film later had its North American premiere at Hot Docs, Canada in 2016 and won awards for best film from Moscow Intl. Doc Fest, Film Southasia Nepal, Sole Luna Doc Fest, Italy among others. More recently, the film won the award ‘Prix Monde en Regards’ from the prestigious 35th Jean Rouch International Film Festival in Paris, France. Ammar’s second feature length documentary, Discount Workers - a German-Pakistani co-production - had its world premiere at One World Film Festival, Prague in 2020. He is also the co-founder of SAMAAJ, a non-profit organization, using arts for creating rights awareness.
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