Yunan (Ameer Fakher Eldin, 2025): Germany

Reviewed by Paloma Paz at SBIFF.

Once upon a time a girl went to see a German film called Yunan directed by Ameer Fakher Eldin during the Santa Barbara Film Festival.

The film was about a Syrian author named Munir played by Georges Khabbaz who lives in Germany. Munir’s mother has Alzheimer’s, which troubles Munir deeply.

She is forgetting who her Munir is.

Throughout the film Munir keeps going back to this fable his mother used to tell him about a shepherd and his wife. The shepherd has no face and no name. Munir begins to see himself in the shepherd.

Because his mother has forgotten who he is, He feels both him and the shepherd are similar, they both have no name and no face.

Munir suffers extremely with his mental health and decides he wants to kill himself. He wants to go to an island in the North Sea to do it. The journey is long and he is exhausted as he tries to find a place to stay for the night.

He meets an older woman who finally after Munir’s pleading, agrees to help him.

As the film plays out, the girl learns more and more about the character Munir.

She sees beautifully melancholic scenes in the film with beautiful cinematography.

Scenes of Munir alone in a field with cows, symbolizes his absolute sense of isolation. Munir stares out at a storm, while the water slowly rises around him, just like his loneliness and depression building up around

him. The sea symbolizes his consuming feeling of being forgotten.

The film is full of wide shots of landscapes, panning over nature with monologues, intertwining the story of Munir and a fable his mother told him as a child.

Throughout the film we see Munir come to terms with his life, his loneliness and his roots.

The girl begins to understand Munir’s connection to his home, his family, and most of all the girl sees that part of this journey to the North Sea is because of Munir’s grief for his mother. Munir feels a deep sense of longing for his home and childhood, when his mother still remembered his name, when he was remembered.

Throughout the film Munir grapples with the idea he is being forgotten, as he says “As if he never existed”.

The girl is moved by the film.

The girl finds the film very poetic, full of themes of change, loneliness, remembrance and family. 

She is moved, the beauty of each shot, the use of nature in relation to Munir’s emotions, the intense and raw emotions translated through the acting.