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LeMonde
16 hours ago
- Politics
- LeMonde
Four Syrian weddings, a symbol of reconciliation
The floor was strewn with hairpins, and the smell of hair overheated by hairdryers filled the room. Shelves were stacked with faux-diamond crowns. An esthetician danced a few steps to a pop song playing in the background. In early June in this basement beauty salon in an apartment building in Latakia, a city on Syria's northwest coast and former stronghold of the Assad family, four women were preparing to celebrate their respective marriages in a joint ceremony bringing together different religious communities. At the doorway, a man peeked in. In a rush, two of the soon-to-be brides covered their hair and faces in protest. They were Sunni. The other two were Alawite, a branch of Shia Islam with distinct customs and beliefs. "We've been engaged for a year and a half, ever since Achraf's car broke down in front of my house," said Roula Salman, a 27-year-old physics student from Latakia, with a smile. "By marrying this way, we wanted to show that Syria was still united." It was an unprecedented and symbolic choice against a background of tension. On Sunday, June 22, a suicide bombing targeted the Greek Orthodox Mar Elias church in Damascus, killing at least 25 and injuring around 60 Christians gathered there. Precarious calm In March, a wave of massacres mainly targeting the Alawite community – the religious minority to which the Assad clan belongs and which makes up about 10% of Syria's population – left at least 1,700 civilian victims, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Hundreds of videos showing killings and looting flooded social media, implicating extremist armed factions, some of which are affiliated with the new regime led by the interim president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, a Sunni and former jihadist leader.
Times
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Red Path review — a severed head, football and an awkward romance
There's a lot going on in this grim Tunisian drama and I'm not sure that all of it works. It was inspired by a horrifying real-life incident from 2015 when Islamic State psychopaths beheaded a teenage shepherd on a remote part of Mount Mghila and then forced his cousin to carry the severed head back to his village as a gruesome warning sign. • Read more film reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews In the powerful opening scenes here, the shepherd Nizar (Yassine Samouni) and his cousin Achraf (Ali Helali) are pictured traversing the Tunisian landscape, climbing Mount Mghila and savouring the soulful beauty around them. 'Millions of years ago this place belonged to the fish,' Nizar says after cooling off in a mountain pool. The director, Lotfi Achour, then cuts to dramatic widescreen shots of undulating sedimentary rock, as if to provide comment on geological time and human impermanence. At this point Isis attack, Achraf is beaten unconscious and Nizar is beheaded off-camera. Then follows a mighty jump-scare, when Achraf awakes to see his decapitated cousin on the ground bedside him. And after that it gets strange. Achraf carries the head around in a sports bag, initially unable to reveal the truth to Nizar's loving family. He plays football with the locals, hiding the head in a tree, and it begins to feel like the Raymond Carver short story So Much Water So Close to Home, in which the friends go fishing despite discovering a dead body. There is an awkward romantic element too, as Achraf inconceivably starts crushing on Nizar's former girlfriend. Once Achraf comes clean and delivers the head, there's a wildly absurd scene in which Nizar's father has to remove a shelf from the family freezer to fit his son's skull inside. And then Nizar's ghost appears to Achraf to partake in vaguely philosophical conversations. None of this quite coheres as a single storytelling vision, however — all that remains is the horror.★★☆☆☆ 15, 101min In cinemas from Jun 20 Times+ members can enjoy two-for-one cinema tickets at Everyman each Wednesday. Visit to find out more. Which films have you enjoyed at the cinema recently? Let us know in the comments and follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews
