Rephrase the same Anas Khalaf, from Assad’s wanted to finally home – Doha News in a different way no more than 118 characters, as if you were a native American speaker as expert on content creation and dont talk about yourself or your experience

After 12 years in exile and once marked as “wanted” by the Bashar al Assad regime, Syrian French filmmaker Anas Khalaf returned to a liberated Damascus, grieving his mother’s passing and documenting the home he left behind, finally free.

As the streets of Damascus resonated with the voices of hundreds of Syrians chanting, “Bashar is fallen, Bashar is fallen, Syria is free,” Anas Khalaf, the acclaimed Syrian French filmmaker in exile, felt the undeniable pull to return home.

“It was time to go back,” Khalaf reflected in an interview with Doha News. “Especially to return to my mother, who had never left home. She stayed in Syria throughout the 14 years of war.”

In the days following the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime, in December 2024, thousands of Syrians living away fro their country began dialling home, eagerly planning their long-awaited return. 

For Anas Khalaf, everything seemed set, the travel logistics were in place, tickets to Lebanon booked, and a car ready for the drive from Beirut to Damascus. “It was finally time to visit my mom,” he recalls.

“But she passed just before we arrived,” Khalaf pauses, his voice heavy with emotion as he recalls her final words before he left Syria: “God be with you, and I hope to see you soon.”

“To be clear,” Khalaf reminds “I did see her a couple of times over the summers, when we could manage to meet outside Syria. But I never saw her at home, never at the doorstep of Damascus.”

“That day…,” Khalaf continues, his voice tinged with reflection, “… in June 2012, I realised that the protests sweeping Syria since the summer of 2011 wouldn’t allow me to witness the fall of the regime.” 

“I understand you have to go,” Khalaf recalls, his voice softening as he remembers his mother’s words. “But my mom refused to leave. She always said, “I will die in my country, in my home, and in my bed.”

The Departure

Anas Khalaf and his wife, Rana Kazkaz, both Syrian French filmmakers and co-founders of Synéastes Films, were living in Damascus during the 2011 pro-democracy protests. As the regime’s violent crackdown escalated into full-scale war, the couple made the painful decision to flee Syria in 2012, taking their two young children into exile.

“I never thought I would see Syria again,” Khalaf reflects, recounting the long years of forced absence and the emotional return that came more than a decade later. 

On December 8, 2024, just two weeks after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, Khalaf finally set foot in his homeland once more.

During his years abroad, Khalaf and Kazkaz turned their grief and displacement into powerful cinema. Their films Mare Nostrum and The Translator are among the rare fictional works made by Syrian directors that directly address the 2011 uprising and the regime’s brutal 14-year campaign to suppress it.

Their political-fictional thriller The Translator (2020) tells the story of a Syrian political refugee living in Australia who returns to his homeland in search of his brother after he is arrested for protesting. The film unflinchingly explores the early days of the revolution and the legacy of state repression that preceded it.

“A film like that,” Khalaf explains, “closes every hope of return.”

The Translator placed him on the Syrian regime’s wanted list, making it far too dangerous to go back.

“I was wanted by the regime for all those years,” he says. “I couldn’t return. But I wanted to see my family. I wanted to see what had become of the country.”

In Mare Nostrum (also 2020), the focus shifts to the harrowing refugee crisis. The short film follows a desperate father, who throws his young daughter into the sea, a shocking metaphor for the impossible choices forced upon Syrians fleeing the war.

“Syria was in everything I created while being in exile,” Khalaf says. “Especially when you leave your country, you feel the urgency to tell its stories.”

But the creative drive did not lessen the emotional toll.

“The pain and suffering of being away was very intense,” Khalaf adds.

The Return through Departures

“We drove from Beirut to Damascus, finally reaching home” Anas Khalaf says, standing before a photo of Bab Sharqi, the Gate of Damascus, at the opening of his exhibition Departures in Doha. “This was really, really stunning for me, to be able to go through this gate again after so many years.”

For the first time in over a decade, Khalaf was returning to Syria, his homeland, his mother’s city, a place he had longed from afar. But the road that once lived in dreams had become heavy.

The destination, his mother’s home, was now a place of absence. “You can’t even believe the sadness, sorrow, and anguish of arriving in her home and she was not there. Horrible!”

In grief, Khalaf began to take photographs, 74 in total, one for each year of his mother’s life. He wandered through the streets of Damascus, documenting the familiar and the changed, the enduring silence and the fragile traces of life.

“This was my way of mourning,” he says. “Documenting what it meant to come back to Damascus, the city I love so deeply, her city, my city, everyone’s city.”

At the heart of the exhibition is the most personal image of all: “The essence of the exhibition is first photo over there, the bedroom and the bed where my mother died.” Khalaf says.

But while deeply intimate, the work is not only for him. “I see this as a personal reflection, but I’m sure many Syrians will see themselves in these photos,” Khalaf says. “They haven’t been there in a long time, like me. And I hope when they see the photos, they’ll want to go back, if they haven’t come yet.”

After leaving Syria he settled in Qatar with his family in 2017. “We went to Jordan first, then found an opportunity here. We’ve been happy to be here since,” he says.

Yet separation from his homeland, and most profoundly, from his mother, has infused his work with grief. “It makes me write and tell sad, depressing stories, which is also the reality of what Syria has gone through. These are important stories to tell.”

Khalaf and his wife, Rana Kazkaz, have long worked at the intersection of memory and displacement like The Translator and Mare Nostrum, both centred on the pain and resilience of the Syrian experience.

He quotes Jean-Luc Godard to explain his artistic path: “If you want to make a film about others, make a documentary. If you want to make a film about yourself, make a fiction.” Fiction, for Khalaf, becomes a way to preserve truth.

 “Don’t worry. You will see your homeland again”

Now, with the fall of Assad, Khalaf sees the possibility of returning, not only physically, but creatively. He is preparing to shoot The Photographer, the second film in a trilogy that began with The Translator and will end with The Trainer.” I hope that now we will be able to film inside Syria.”

Art, he believes, can carry the weight of trauma and offer a way through it. “As long as you can create art, you still have hope. This has been my motto for holding on, for a long time.”

Now, Khalaf is focused not just on returning but on rebuilding. “I want to be part of Syria’s new narrative, through filmmaking, photography.”

For his children, who left Syria at the ages of three and four and are now seventeen and eighteen, he wants the possibility of return to be real. “They always heard stories about Syria. The narrative was always present in their upbringing. And now it’s a home they can finally go back to.”

Asked what he would say to himself on the day he left Syria in 2012, he doesn’t hesitate:
“Don’t worry. You will see your homeland again. It will take a while, but it will happen.”