Valley of Exile: When Coping with War is 'Women's Work'

By Liz Braun

Rating: B

In Valley of Exile, writer-director Anna Fahr focuses on a handful of women to paint a broader picture of the domestic exigencies of war. 

The film is set in 2013, in the early years of the Syrian civil war, and is centred on two sisters, Nour (Hala Hosni) and Rima (Maria Hassan) who have travelled to Lebanon to escape the conflict at home.

Nour (Hala Hosni) and Rima (Maria Hassan) take stock of their new “home.”

Older sister Rima is pregnant with her first child and waits for her husband to join the women in Lebanon. Nour is still a teenager and is mostly concerned with finding their missing brother. The family is already decimated, as their parents are dead, presumably in the war. The sisters are very close, but generational differences are immediately obvious: Nour is young and brash, willing to take risks, and Rima is far more traditional in her outlook.

As the story begins, the women are just arriving in the Bekaa Valley area of Lebanon. A bus drops them off in the middle of nowhere. They’ve had a tough journey, but Rima’s husband has arranged a place for them to live. That doesn’t work out, and the women are left to their own devices, far from home and with limited money.

Nour finds them a spot with an older Palestinian woman, Haifa (Najwa Kandakji) and her niece Shirin (Joy Hallak) in a refugee camp. Rima is initially horrified to think that they have to stay in such a place. But Haifa has created a real home within the ragtag city of tents and the women eventually settle in.

Shirin seems unhappy at first to share space with Rima and Nour. But once Nour becomes a go-between, carrying messages to Shirin from Shirin’s soldier boyfriend (Sajed Amer), the younger women become friends.

Rima decides to find work. She wants to teach, but is advised that cleaning houses is a better idea, and she goes to work housecleaning for a local engineer, Khaled (Michel Hourani), who is a widower.

Nour, meanwhile, undertakes increasingly risky forays into the nearby countryside in hopes of finding their brother, who may be running with a group of rebels. She and Rima eventually are in conflict, as Rima intends to go forward and create a new life in Lebanon, and Nour, who yearns for Syria, keeps putting any new opportunity at risk. 

As tragedy continues to dog their lives, both sisters must decide where their loyalties lie.

Valley of Exile is a slow, closely observed and very personal story that distils the terrible cost of conflict and presents it on a relatable human scale. While the film celebrates the women’s resilience, it also shows the gradual, inexorable unravelling of family as all things familiar fall away. 

At one point in the story, the women glimpse a news report on TV of fighting in their hometown of Homs, a city that was eventually under siege for three years. The report they see concerns the humanitarian crisis in Homs after 500 days of war.  The images show a city bombed into rubble, a purposeful destruction of homes and entire neighbourhoods. It’s just a few seconds, but the enormity of the displacement is overwhelming — there’s nothing left. 

So where is home? Where do the women belong? How could you ever go back? And how do you move forward?

Valley of Exile: Written and directed by Anna Fahr, starring Maria Hassan, Hala Hosni, Michel Hourani, Najwa Kondakji, Joy Hallak, Sajed Amer. In Canadian theatres July 5.