Return in Fragments

Return in Fragments is a cinematic research project composed of poetic and essayistic film fragments. It investigates the ethical, aesthetic, and political dimensions of returning —returning to images, to geographies, to histories, and to memory itself. 

Structured as a constellation rather than a linear narrative, the project proposes the fragment as both method and ethic. It resists closure, choosing instead to listen attentively to absence, silence, and spectral traces. 

The research navigates archival materials, intimate voiceover, and poetic image compositions to explore how displacement affects both cinematic language and political belonging. While the project emerges from personal experience—displacement and recent brief returning to Syria after a decade in exile—it also poses broader questions: How does onefilm a return that cannot be completed? What does it mean to remember with images? And can testimony take the form of poetic dissonance rather than narrative clarity? Developed across shifting temporalities, Return in Fragments unfolds through a non- linear, embodied, and deliberately unstable cinematic language.. 

It does not aim to resolve its contradictions, but to hold them—delicately, urgently, and with care.

Jaar

2025