
On March 18, 2024, MigraMedia Münster kicked off this year’s Erasmus+ spring activities by hosting a film screening of Yehuda Sharim’s 2019 documentary, Songs That Never End, with the director himself as guest on campus. Dr. Sharim is not only a leading artist in international independent cinema, focusing on topics of displacement and migration, but he is also a keen-eyed photographer, poet, scholar, educator, and activist in a range of human rights issues. The consortium felt honored to welcome such a distinguished intellectual in their ranks and learned from him personally about his thoughts and approaches. In an extended podium discussion, the audience had the opportunity to share in his vision of filmmaking and beyond.
Yehuda Sharim was welcomed that evening by the MigraMedia officials and the Münster audience, as well as a fair number of his long-term students from broader contexts in Germany, an apt imprint of his educational work and stance. Screening Songs That Never End proved to be a captivating experience for everyone involved, a bit disconcerting by turns, yet again edifying through the form of deep-time contemplation and discussion that Dr. Sharim demands, in order to have his pieces enter into a realm of inter-subjective understanding. The film started with an epigraph that read, “If the singer stops singing, life ends,” thereby calling upon the audience to listen to singers on the verge of silence, who yet struggle to voice their songs.
The film introduced viewers to the Dayan family in a critical, post-asylum phase of their lives – parents Abbas and Samira, their teenage boy Ali, nine-year-old Hana, and the toddlers Helia and Eliah, who broke away from their native homeland Iran and moved to Houston, Texas (where Songs is set), where they had hoped to establish a new home, a better life with more opportunities. But instead of providing fresh life perspectives for the family, their lives remain in existential limbo; the place where they had hoped for stability is rampant with new and old kinds of uncertainties: financial, occupational, familial, emotional, and mental – not to speak of a hostile environment in more than one sense.
Viewers were thus confronted with disillusionment and pains, and – acoustically haunting – unfiltered noises, from the streets and the radio and crying family members, both speaking to the stress level of the Dayan microcosm and, correspondingly, insinuating the larger, global scene and the disturbing state of world politics today. Yet, such episodes of confusion were time and again lit up by rays of grace during the screening, scenes radiating endurance, self-respect, and affection among the Dayans for one another. In the film, moving and personal love poems are recited by heart among Abbas and Samira, and heartwarming dreams persist among the children – from Hana’s self-envisioning as a runner into freedom and lightness, to Ali’s genuine plan to live a future life in happiness on another planet in outer space.
The conversation after the screening provided vital insights for the audience and the director, into ways of perceiving this complex documentary. While spectators, in engaged contributions, were grateful to both ask pertinent questions and liken plotlines to some of their own personal experiences, Dr. Sharim candidly discussed production details as well as broader issues of social justice, migrant rights, and human solidarity. One of the common feelings unfolding in the process referred to songs of dignity and hope, which are sung against the odds and which need further space and occasion for being listened to.
For a trailer of Songs That Never End, please visit:
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/songsthatneverend
For more information on the director and his work, please visit: