Twelve years in the making, Republic of Silence bears witness to a tragedy on an epic scale, accompanied by an ever-expanding mosaic of fragile, deeply embedded moments from Diana El Jeiroudi’s life, beginning with the memory from the age of seven when her father gives her a camera, right up to the present day.

Sometimes the frame holds a definitive version of what is happening in the world around the filmmaker. And then it collapses. White letters emerge on a black screen to conjure her inner world in this cinematic memoir.

A formal and orderly life in Berlin competes with a life in Damascus that is perforated by dictatorship and dismantled by wars and international political corruption. Director El Jeiroudi takes solace in cinema, music, the serenity of dreams, and the daily solidarity of a durable and abiding love story.