Return in Fragments
by Azouz Abdulazez
Research & project
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.
Azouz Abdulazez
Azouz Abdulazez is a filmmaker, photographer, poet, political exilee, and researcher working across essay film, experimental documentary, and performance. His practice weaves poetic narration with political memory, often exploring how voice, absence, and fragmented testimony can form a cinematic ethics of return.
With a background in photojournalism, activism, and diasporic experience, his work resists resolution, insisting on the incomplete as a space for meaning. He studied engineering at the University of Aleppo, but left shortly before graduation for political reasons. His early experiences of uprising, betrayal, and exile continue to reverberate through his artistic research.
Much of his work returns to these ruptures—not to settle them, but because their echoes still call, still unsettle, still demand a response. Azouz works in film as one might write a poem or dig a grave: carefully, with questions. His camera listens more than it sees. His narrators often stammer or hesitate. Memory, in his work, is never static—always unstable, partial, flickering like light through broken blinds.