Before i forget

What if you could never return to the place where your memories were made? Razan Hassan’s documentary short, Before I Forget, is an autobiographical exploration of how memory and identity are fractured by forced displacement. Following her journey from Syria to the Netherlands, Razan begins to question the veracity of her recollections of home, family, and childhood. She tries to recapture a fragment of this lost past through digitizing the sole memento she carried with her from Syria: a tape recording of a poem she recited as a 3 year-old child – only to find that the tape has been corrupted and its contents are forever lost. Razan takes us along on an inner journey of emotional trauma and conflict visualized through psychedelic club scenes, archived family footage, and a news clip of her family home in Damascus collapsing during a raid by regime forces. While her daily life in Amsterdam remains unfamiliar, she is able to forge new memories in unexpected places.