Chaos

Set in three cities, Syrian filmmaker Sara Fattahi’s recent documentary, the beautifully and intimately filmed Chaos, looks at the impact of the Syrian war on three women. In Damascus an elderly woman repeats daily rituals as she mourns the death of her son, until, at one point, she reveals her rage. An artist, living in exile in Sweden after the death of her teenage brother, creates collage pieces while relating the beginnings of her bipolar disorder. An actress wanders around Vienna, the filmmaker’s new home. Her sections are accompanied by audio recordings of the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, in which, among other things, she asks “What does it actually mean to describe the whole of society, the state of an era’s consciousness? . . . And the sickness, the torment in it,” echoing the filmmaker’s current concerns.