A Flood in Baath Country
France, 2003
Arabic and French, with English subtitles 
48 min

33 years ago, Omar Amiralay was unconditionally for the modernization of his country, Syria, to the point of devoting his first film to glorifying a dam on the Euphrates, proudly built by the Baath Party, which was in power at the time. Today he regrets the error of his youth. The collapse of the dam and the revelation in an official report that all the dams built during the reign of the Baath Party will succumb to this same fate has driven Amiralay to return to the location of his first film. The region around Lake Assad is now the Syria of Hafez el-Assad. Amiralay has chosen to film a village in this new Syria. The village, its inhabitants, and even its source of water all have the same name, El Machi. Governed by a tribal chief who is a member of Parliament and run by his nephew, the school principal and party leader, this "El Machienne" entity is a perfect reflection of the country the Baath Party has been fashioning for the past forty years without sharing power with anyone.
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