Anqa

The first images are accompanied by a gentle bubbling sound and create a sense of disorientation. A cloudy panorama, a street in the fog, a dark corridor. This ominous exterior stands in contrast to the warmer colour scheme of the apartments where the film’s protagonists spend their time. The three women share similarly traumatising experiences of violence in Jordan; they allude to rape, assault, detention as they speak. In their apartments, they seek refuge from the violence of the outside world.

Helin Çelik does not tell these women’s stories, but rather sketches their post-traumatic situation in impressive, poetic film imagery. Raquel Fernández Núñez's camera shows their bodies in extreme close-ups: eye sockets marked by insomnia, trembling hands. Their traumas also reveal disturbing thoughts, such as one protagonist’s idea to kill her children to protect them. At the same time, she is seen interacting with them lovingly. ANQA shows how these women struggle not to allow the suffering they have experienced to define them. “I am not the remains ,” one of them says. “I exist.” (Jan-Philipp Kohlmann)