This gorgeous one-shot film explores what happens when prison keeps families apart
The surreal four-minute short stitches together letters between prisoners and their families into a haunting portrait of a father and his son.
A public square in Lebanon, a crowd of schoolchildren, a young man and his father, smoking a cigarette. Wa’ad, the new short film from Brooklyn-based filmmaker and TED Fellow Bassam Tariq, begins as an ordinary family episode, but it quickly transforms into a surreal spectacle. Watch the full film below.
Wa’ad — which means “The Promise” in Arabic — was inspired by more than 40 letters between prisoners in the Arab world and their loved ones back home — women writing to husbands, men writing to their wives, children writing to their fathers. “The film is a fictional construct, but a lot of the dialogue comes from actual letters,” Tariq says.
The new four-minute film is a collaboration with the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has been facilitating letters exchanged between prisoners of war and their families for longer than a century. In 2017 alone, the Red Cross delivered more than 150,000 messages between separated family members.
While Wa’ad begins as a conversation between father and son, we soon understand that the scene is all in the imagination of the father, a refugee in prison, who is only reading a letter from his son. “These letters are a form of escape,” Tariq says. “For prisoners, they are one of the only things to look forward to.”
Filmed on location in Beirut over two days last summer, Wa’ad is composed of one continuous shot. “When one gets a letter like this, you don’t stop reading it,” Tariq says. “You read it continuously, in one sitting. When you get a letter, especially if it’s your only escape, you want to savor it as long as you can. So for me, one shot just made sense.”
Tariq also framed the story incredibly tightly, with an aspect ratio of 4:3. “We knew we were going to shoot this in 4:3 because in prison, he’s boxed in, and we wanted to acknowledge the constraint of his imagination in this setting,” Tariq says.
Though the film ends with the father in his prison cell, Tariq also wanted to leave the audience with hope. “It’s a pretty dark piece, but I wanted it to end on a note that reminds us that we’re still programmed to love one another,” Tariq says. “We all have tension with our families, but we still want to make these relationships work. So for the son to write to his father that he knows he’ll keep his promise to come back home, to give his father that agency — I felt this was an important moment for them to reach.”
Read more about the new film on Vice.
The TED Fellows program supports emerging innovators from around the world to raise international awareness of their work and maximize their impact.
