“Return to Paradise” follows the journey of Mahmoud, a young Syrian who, after ten years of displacement, decides to return to his hometown Deir-ez-Zor to rebuild his life from the ruins. Shot between Europe, Jordan, and Syria, the film explores what it means to return — not only to a place, but to oneself. It weaves intimate observation with the political realities of war, exile, and reconstruction.
The camera becomes a companion in this search for belonging and dignity amid the contradictions of a broken world. Ultimately, Return to Paradise is a meditation on resilience, friendship, and the human longing for home.
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>> watch trailer >>
In times of proliferating global crises
(climate emergency, dwindling biodiversity, refugee crisis, Covid-19, the
Russian war against Ukraine, the conflict in the Middle East), I am grappling
with a personal health crisis that also feels existential. For seven years I
have been unable to find the cause or right treatment for my intestinal
problems. Throughout these years, doctors regularly confronted me with the fact
that, based on a variety of tests and according to the measurable data, I was
healthy. Yet, my body was telling me something completely different.
Since the onset of an inexplicable sense of
numbness in my body, I have been forced to discover on my own how to feel
better. Photography has since been part of this search. Its omnipresence in our
everyday lives and its seductive possibility to make a claim on reality have likely
led me to choose it as my favourite tool. I consider the medium as a
symptomatic lens for our society’s strong belief in the visible, the things we
can measure and count, and its striving to control the world rationally and
technically.
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In the story of separation, we live in, nature had to be turned into dead goods, into an object to dominate it. At the same time in modern western societies everything we can count and measure has a higher reality status. What we feel has been devalued as pure subjectivity.
But maybe deep inside of us we can feel our interdependencies. That’s why we often bury our violent acts against other
But maybe deep inside of us we can feel our interdependencies. That’s why we often bury our violent acts against other
beings and everything connected to it in the dark.
We don’t want to feel the pain. Isn’t this pain an indicator, just like all of our feeling are, for a connection? Can we find a way to listen to them as an act of change?
My images illustrate a research on the dialectic of the separation and fascination for
other life on this planet.
We don’t want to feel the pain. Isn’t this pain an indicator, just like all of our feeling are, for a connection? Can we find a way to listen to them as an act of change?
My images illustrate a research on the dialectic of the separation and fascination for
other life on this planet.
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2020-2021
A family has to flee Afghanistan and is subjected to the complicated asylum procedure in the EU. After five five years living in Germany with his son father Mohammad achieves a ban on deportation. This is needed to try to get his wife and the second son to live with him. With this he tries to get his wife and the second son to live with him. When he travels to Iran to get the marriage certificate required for
this, he loses his passport. At the Afghan embassy he is told that it can take up to six months to get a new passport. But since he has to go back to his son in Germany, in the end he has no other option than to make it a second time across the Mediterranean to Europe with his family. They end up in the Moria camp on Lesbos...
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