Limbo 1:43 PM Vikash Bhai (left) as Farhad and Amir El-Masry (right) as Omar in director Ben Sharrock s LIMBO.
Image courtesy of Focus Features
On the secluded Scottish Uists, Syrian refugee Omar (Amir El-Masry) awaits an update for his pending asylum application. Each day, in an almost Sisyphean display, he traverses the windswept island with a cumbersome oud case in hand that is, the hand not currently wrapped in a pink plaster cast. Back in Syria he was the star progeny of his oud-playing grandfather, he tells his friend Farhad (Vikash Bhai). But, due to his injury, he hasn’t picked up the instrument since he left home.
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As the Syrian civil war stretches into its 11th official year, its humanitarian cost remains staggering. According to the UN Refugee Agency, more than 6.6 million Syrians have been displaced, with 5.5 million of that number settling nearby in other Middle Eastern or North African countries such as Lebanon, Turkey, and Egypt. Others, though, have traveled outside of the zone of tangential cultural familiarity to North America or Europe, and Ben Sharrock’s
Limbo captures the excruciating loneliness of their circumstances.
In contrast to on-the-ground documentaries like
The White Helmets and
The Cave, which have focused on the devastation within Syria, the entirely fictional