In his childhood, Tammuz watched a film about the life of a young boy, and through it he was surprised at how much cinema can convey human lives and their details: “There is someone far away who lives just like me!” Since that time, he became fond of films, and their heroes became friends with whom he lived. In his youth, he traveled to Dubai, to collect money and realize his dream of studying cinema, but he became immersed in the worlds of sex and money and moved away from his dream, until the revolution and then the war broke out in Syria, when he woke up from his nightmare and realized that hundreds of films were waiting for him in his homeland to wake them from their slumber.
“Between Ropes of Water” is a novel about the love of cinema, in which Rosa Yassin Hassan combines, with a unique technique, reality with films, so that we can hardly distinguish between reality and imagination, we meet characters we loved, we read phrases we heard, and we re-draw scenes we liked...
“Sarrah” is an immigrant in Sweden. Since the start of the war in her country, she has been unable to write. She seeks to seize the key to freedom of expression, but she faces locks. She works with an autistic child, whose father, Gibran, works in a library and fights discrimination, but he still finds himself in dark basements.
“Gibran” longs for “Sarrah,” and she longs for writing, remembering her days in Hama, and her ambition to find peace.
In this novel, Manhal Al-Sarraj tells us, in a different style of narration and writing, the story of Syrian immigrants in Sweden, their circumstances, and the fragmentation of their relationships, and quietly scatters reflections on existence, life, trust, love, and peace.
