Love, Youth, And The Desired Hope
Directed by yara hafez
Syria · 2024 · 29 min 45 sec · Drama
Submitted to RTV International Film Festival 2026Synopsis
A bus driver roams the streets of Damascus, becoming an unintended witness to the stories and burdens of the people he carries. During the day, he silently faces the city’s transformations and the weight of its people. In the evenings, he retreats to a quiet spot beside the Barada River, where he writes these encounters in his diary, not as they happened, but as he wishes they had, or as if history had taken a different course. Through poetry and imagination, he rewrites the stories of the city and its people, attempting to restore to Damascus a rhythm, beauty, and music he feels it has lost. In this private world, reality gradually begins to intrude. The space around him grows narrower, and the boundary between the city he imagines and the city he inhabits becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. Finally, an old photograph hanging from his mirror unexpectedly comes to life. A dialogue emerges between them, bringing the past face to face with a present he can no longer change
About the film
In Damascus, a city whose features are quietly changing under the weight of time, a service-taxi driver spends his days moving between its streets and stops. Through his work, he becomes an unwitting witness to the stories and burdens of ordinary people, encountered during repetitive journeys, brief stops, and fleeting moments on the street. His vehicle becomes a transient space where unknown destinies intersect, while fragments of other people’s lives gradually accumulate within him, leaving him increasingly confronted with a reality that grows harsher, more banal, and more burdensome with each passing day. The driver lives between two contradictory realities. By day, he faces the city as it has become, with all its troubles, conflicts, and transformations. In the evening, he retreats to a small corner overlooking the Barada River, searching for a private space where he can regain some control over this reality. There, he writes in his diary, but he does not record events as they happened. Instead, he rewrites the city and its people’s stories as he wishes they had unfolded, or as if history could have taken another path. In his notebooks, reality becomes something that can be erased and written anew. He tries to restore a rhythm Damascus has lost, bringing music and poetry back to its streets. In his imagination, the Barada regains its presence as a river carrying the city’s memory and symbolism, rather than merely bearing the traces of its decline. His visions of Damascus and the Barada River take shape in images where memory and imagination intertwine, revealing another city, or perhaps one that can no longer exist except through writing. His evenings are accompanied by songs by Mohamed Abdel Wahab, broadcast from a forgotten radio, and by an old photograph of an unknown young woman that has hung from his car’s rearview mirror for more than twenty years, since he was a young man. This was once a common custom among many service-taxi drivers in Damascus. Over the years, the photograph has become a silent companion and a window through which he looks back on his youth, another time, and perhaps an image of the city he tries to preserve in his memory as everything around him changes. Yet reality keeps finding its way into the world he has created for himself. The stories he once could reshape in his notebooks grow heavier, and the narratives to which he used to give different endings begin to resist his imagination. Even the small corner overlooking the Barada, where he has always sought refuge and written, gradually begins to disappear, until remaining there becomes impossible. What once offered him a private space to escape and reimagine the world becomes subject to the same limits imposed by the changing city. It points to a political and security reality that does not merely reshape streets and places, but also reaches into memory and the inner spaces people turn to in order to preserve their ability to dream. As this burden accumulates, the driver begins to lose his ability to keep rewriting the city as he once did. His imagination falters, and it becomes increasingly difficult for him to see reality differently. As the last space he could retreat to grows narrower, his gaze returns to the old photograph of the woman hanging in his car, an image that has remained silent throughout his journey. At the very moment when he can no longer imagine the city differently, the woman in the photograph begins to look at him and speak. The photograph becomes more than a trace of the past, opening into an imagined dialogue between them, as though the past itself were finding its voice in the face of a present he can no longer rewrite. The Barada River does not appear in the film merely as a backdrop to the events, but as a witness to the city and its transformations, carrying echoes of Damascus and the memories of its people, even as its presence in reality recedes alongside the shrinking space that allows the driver to dream and write. Through documentary footage filmed in the heart of Damascus, the film weaves together the boundaries of documentary and imagination, creating a poetic cinematic language that contemplates the relationship between people and their city, between what actually happened and what might have happened, and between a memory resisting erasure and a reality that never ceases to wipe away its traces.
Director(s)
I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture and a Diploma in Cinematic Sciences. I have worked as a researcher and writer for documentary programs, as well as in architectural and advertising design, and have served as a research assistant with several independent research institutions. For two years, I wrote analytical articles on cinema for the Filmmakers Club in Damascus, and I am a board member of the Jaramana Cinema Club. During my studies in Cinematic Sciences, I directed several short training films, as well as my graduation film, What Was Written on the Forehead (2023). I developed my first documentary film, The Cave of Red Cuts, through the Stories Film Lab. My first professional film, Love, Youth, and the Hoped-for Dream (2026), is based on a screenplay that won the Youth Cinema Support Competition organized by Syria’s General Cinema Organization. The film was subsequently produced and completed with the support awarded through the competition.
Trailer
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Film stills
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RTV International Film Festival — Inaugural Online Edition · 2026