Sugar Cage the First Documentary for Zeinah Alqahwaji

The Dok Leipzig Festival in Germany recently hosted the premiere of Sugar Cage by director Zeinah Alqahwaji, a film supported by the Laboratory of Arts programme. In an attempt to record a standstill life, the filmmaker trains her camera to examine the intimate life of her aging parents over the course of 8 years since the beginning of war in Syria, observing scenes of isolation, fear, and stagnancy that overshadow life at home. Yet they are still equated with enough sensibilities and love bonding them together against the heaviness of time and war.

Zeinah Alqahwaji was born in 1986 in Syria. She started working in the documentary film industry in 2010. In 2017, she obtained her master’s degree in documentary filmmaking at “DocNomads” a European joint master program. She has just finished her first feature length documentary Sugar Cage, and is currently developing her next feature. 

Regarding her artistic options in the sugar cage, Zeinah says: "In this film, I tried to find my own artistic and political equations, avoiding getting close to the cinema of war and conflict directly which required a lot of experience, maturity, and psychological and intellectual distance that I was missing at the time. Working the personal aspect to meet my great need to express what is going on around me through my artistic practice. "

Zeinah believes that Syrian cinema is in a critical condition at the moment, especially when it comes to the recent tendency for conflict amongst filmmakers, which is a phenomenon that was not witnessed on the same levels in other artistic sectors such as visual arts, theatre and literature. Zeinah says, “I feel afraid sometimes from this phenomenon. To have different opinions is a natural thing but the rupture, and hostility is a painful and discouraging situation. We need today more than ever to develop the art of cinema and to empower its ability to depict the extend of the events, artistically and in a humane way. This includes not relying only on the documentation level, and requires us all to overcome the hostility among each other and pave the way for new ideas and a young generation to produce their films without prior fear of exclusion”

In the production of her film, Zeinah relied on a few sources, generally of which were regional. She had to send applications to most of the funding opportunities available in the Arab region and some of them allowed her to continue working. “The film was shot over years in a personal context, so all that was needed was to fund post-production expenses, image correction and sound production. The grants were insufficient, because they covered purely technical expenses, but they were not enough,” says Zeina. Perhaps I had to wait and apply for new courses regional grants, or participate in development courses with third parties, but I did not want to postpone the production of the film any longer, because I believe that personal films do not usually get large production opportunities, especially in the Arab region and at this particular times, where more attention is drawn towards other topics such as conflict. So, I decided to continue the work and finish it. "

Zeina sees that creating more artistic and cinematic platforms that bring producers and industry together with emerging filmmakers is an urgent priority that could help filmmakers to partly overcome the difficulties of marketing their own films. Zeinah notes, “I do marketing tasks and find opportunities on a small scale in a random, unsecured way, because festivals and podiums often have certain screening policies. Viewing committees do not always watch all applied films and they focus usually on recommended films. I always try to find an experienced producer or distributor, who is part of a good network in this area and therefore able to market my film and present it to the right people. "