Almourad Aldeeb (born 1991 in Homs) is a Syrian filmmaker currently completing his studies in film directing at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM). His films explore memory and time through a restrained and contemplative cinematic language.

Extended Director Biography
Almourad Aldeeb (born 1991, Homs, Syria) is a Syrian filmmaker and editor based in Cologne, Germany. He is currently completing his studies in film directing at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM). His work moves between documentary, narrativ, and experimental film, developing a restrained and contemplative cinematic language shaped by an ongoing engagement with memory, time, and displacement.
He began his studies at the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Damascus. In 2013, he was arrested and detained in Branch 215 following his involvement in the Syrian civil movement. After his release in 2014, he left Syria and eventually settled in Germany.
Working from personal experience, Almourad’s films do not aim to reconstruct events directly, but rather to approach memory as something fragmented, layered, and constantly reshaped by time and distance. His practice reflects a search for forms that can hold absence, silence, and the traces left by lived experience. Through a precise and minimal approach, his films allow images and spaces to unfold slowly, maintaining a careful distance from what they depict.
His work includes Jafaaf / On the Dry Bank of the River (2024), which premiered in competition at the Cairo International Film Festival. Flood (2022), selected for the competition at Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg. Wilhelmsbazar (2021). His latest film, Estahbes / If Only the Year Had 364 Days, continues this path, returning to Syria to confront places and memories connected to his detention, and will premiere at Visions du Réel in 2026.

Director Statement
The idea for Estahbes emerged after my first return to Syria following the fall of the Assad regime. It was a journey through memory, filled with faces, places, and events deeply connected to the past. Some of these places had changed, others had disappeared. What began as a physical return soon became an inner journey through memory itself.
Ten years after my detention in Branch 215 in Damascus, I returned to visit the families of seven friends who were tortured to death. I also returned to the prison where we had been held together, to confront that place again and to witness its demise. The film became a way to approach these memories carefully and to understand what I call an “incomplete survival”: the experience of leaving prison physically while something of it remains inside.
Estahbes takes its name from a word I learned in prison. It describes the painful adaptation to imprisonment, the moment when a person begins to get used to the brutality and inhuman conditions of detention. Even after the body leaves the prison, the prison does not easily leave the body. This idea became central to the film.
The film is built from personal writings that I kept during the years of exile and later reworked after returning to Syria. It takes the form of narrated notes, spoken in my own voice, accompanying carefully chosen images of places connected to the story. The narrative moves across layers of time that have accumulated over these places and memories.
Visually, the film is composed mostly of static shots that maintain a respectful distance from spaces marked by violence and absence. I filmed the project on 16mm with an Arriflex SR3 camera. This choice was not only aesthetic. Working with film imposes a particular rhythm: waiting, preparing each shot carefully, and treating every image as a measured gesture. The materiality of film also felt connected to the materiality of memory itself.
Sound plays an essential role in the film. The voice-over carries the narrative while the sound design creates a restrained sound space that captures the silence of the places. The overall atmosphere remains quiet and contemplative, allowing the images and the voice to unfold slowly.
Estahbes is finally an attempt to gather fragments of memory, to grieve the friends who never returned, and to confront a place that took so many lives. Yet the demise of this prison cannot be complete without justice, and without knowing the fate of everyone who passed through its gates.

Filmography
2018 “Taif” 3min, experimental.
2019 “The Plug” 3min, experimental.
2020 “WilhelmsBazar” 10min, Documentary.
2022 “Flood” 11min, Experimental Documentary.
2024 “Jafaaf / On The Dry Bank Of The River” 23min, Short Narrative.
2026 “Estahbes / If Only The Year Had 364 Days” 80min, Documentary.