Queens of Syria Documentary Dcreening and Director Q&A with Yasmin Fedda

The film follows a group of Syrian refugee women as they put on their own version of Euripides’ ancient Greek play, The Trojan Woman.

Queens of Syria tells the story of fifty women from Syria, all forced into exile in Jordan, who came together in Autumn 2013 to create and perform their own version of the Trojan Women, the timeless Ancient Greek tragedy all about the plight of women in war. What followed was an extraordinary moment of cross-cultural contact across millennia, in which women born in 20th century Syria found a blazingly vivid mirror of their own experiences in the stories of a queen, princesses and ordinary women like them, uprooted, enslaved and bereaved by the Trojan War.

Yasmin Fedda is an award-winning filmmaker and artist whose work has focused on themes from Edinburgh bakeries to Syrian monasteries, and from geek anarchism to forcible disappearance. Her films have been BAFTA-nominated and screened at numerous international festivals including Sundance & Edinburgh Film Festival, and some have screened at galleries. She occasionally makes broadcast films for the BBC and Al Jazeera English. Yasmin has held artist residencies at the Mothlight Micro Cinema, Detroit, and at British School at Rome, Italy.

Yasmin has taught different aspects of film in various settings around the world including with: Syria Mobile Film Festival, British Council, Scottish Documentary Institute, Bidayyat for Audiovisual Arts, Malta City of Culture, and TPD Vietnam, amongst others. She is also a lecturer in Film Practice at Queen Mary University, is co-founder and programmer of Highlight Arts and is part of production company Black Leaf Films.