Written and directed by Lydia Schamschula and Jeremy Glaholt
Featuring Zaher al Taher, Layla Bayazed, Freddie Bechara, Mudar el Sheich Ahmad, Anis Hamdoun, Saja Noori and Abdallah Rahhal (as themselves)
Running time: 45 minutes
Language: English, German, Arabic
Unrated

by Jenny Swadosh

Imagine how it might feel to realize that you have been tricked into believing a two weeks walk from Turkey into Bulgaria will only take a few hours...and that your guide has run off into the night with your money. Or what goes through your mind as you say goodbye to your father and become aware that you will never see him again. Think about how your happiest moments are drinking coffee with your mother on the balcony and the possibility that forever after, these moments may only exist in memories, consigned to a past life. Now, imagine being informed that you should feel grateful. 

A Step without Feet explores the emotions of refugee life through the testimonies of seven young Syrians who have settled in Berlin: Abdallah is a talented singer whose group, Musiqana, contributes a soundtrack to the documentary; Saja is a trained Sufi dancer; Mudar is a teacher and a chef; Anis is a writer and theater director whose spoken word interludes provide transitions between segments; Laila and Zaher are students; and Freddie is a dentist who has just received his license to practice dentistry in Germany. We meet them in winter, bundled up in coats, hats, scarves and flannels to protect against the chill. Everything is gray and devoid of color in Berlin except the fruits and vegetables at the Middle Eastern market Mudar visits with his friends in order to prepare a feast. Yellow lemon rinds on a plate remind us that the sun still exists elsewhere. That “elsewhere” is a major theme of this short documentary; these asylum seekers have bodily arrived in Europe after perilous journeys, but a piece of them lives on simultaneously in Syria, especially for those who left family members -- living and dead -- behind. It is this struggle to maintain a dual existence while presently inhabiting only one place that weighs heavily on the interviewees.

The filmmakers have seamlessly edited the interviews into topics, some of which there is wide agreement on (knowing it was time to leave Syria, the centrality of family and the anguish of parents and siblings dispersed around the globe, the difficulties of starting over), while others engender disparate responses (the potential of returning to Syria). The question of how Germany is different from Syria elicits laughter and enthusiastic comparisons. Laila animatedly describes how bizarre it was for her to ask a stranger for help on the street, only to be met with a firm, “No.” Every Middle Eastern immigrant I know has some version of this story, but, in Laila’s telling, it is also a moment when she feels the weight of displacement. In Syria, no one would respond to her entreaty with such abruptness, but she isn’t in Syria anymore and she accepts the finality of the stranger’s rejection with a sad laugh. 

My major gripe with the film -- apart from my wish to know these people better -- is the subtitling. Abdallah, Saja, Anis and Laila all answer their interview questions in English (Mudar, Freddie and Zaher in German) and they are perfectly understandable to a native English speaker without textual interventions. The subtitles correct and, I believe, distort their statements. In one case, Saja’s spoken use of “humans” is replaced in the subtitles with “people.” Admittedly, I don’t know the current protocols for documentary filmmaking, but when I do oral history transcription, I do not correct grammar or change the words to what I believe the speaker intended to say.

Less pressing is the lack of political context. Should we assume that everyone viewing A Step without Feet is familiar with the basic facts of why refugees from Syria arrived in Europe? When Anis states that he lost his eye for freedom, do we understand what that means apart from lofty ideals and abstract concepts? This conjecture may be accurate for continental European audiences. However, when many Americans remain blithely ignorant of, or are misinformed about, the humanitarian crises that have been developing at our southern border since the 1990s, the filmmakers (Schamschula and  Glaholt) are making incorrect assumptions about their international audiences or, more dangerously, believing that politics and history don’t matter. Perhaps the best way to present this documentary to the public is within community fora, facilitated by journalists, historians, migration experts, human rights advocates and leaders within the Syrian-American community.

A Step without Feet releases on September 4 and will be available to stream on-demand via iTunes, Amazon, GooglePlay, Spectrum and most other platforms as well as in the UK and Germany.