A film that uses projection, painting, and archive to explore Sephardic memory, oral testimony, and the legacy of the 15th-century Corfu Bible.
PROJECTING ALEPPO is a nonfiction film about inheritance and the responsibility of carrying what survives.
My father was born in Aleppo (Halab), Syria, in 1931. At sixteen, he watched from his balcony as the Silvera Synagogue, built by his father, burned during the 1947 riots that followed the United Nations vote to partition Palestine. In the years that followed, Jewish life narrowed under surveillance and restriction. At eighteen, he fled. His family would not be reunited for ten years.
A few years later, my uncle escaped carrying a 11th-century parchment Torah manuscript known as the Silvera Manuscript (Corfu Bible). It had survived the fires intact. In 1961, my grandfather donated it to Israel’s Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem as a complete gift, an act of devotion to the Jewish homeland. The manuscript was later lost.
This film does not seek a villain. It asks a more difficult question:
What does it mean to entrust memory to a nation?
What does it mean to love a country and live with the knowledge that history is fragile?
The film unfolds inside my studio. Archival photographs of Aleppo are projected onto unfinished canvases. Satellite images of Hong Kong, where I was born but do not fully remember, glow on the wall. My father speaks of Halab in fragments. I paint between us.
At a moment when Jewish communities are once again negotiating fear and belonging, PROJECTING ALEPPO explores exile not only as rupture, but as agency, a tradition of rebuilding, of movement, and of choosing life.
Related Writing
In my essay Choosing to Remember (On Being Jewish Now, July 2025), I reflect on my father’s escape from Aleppo, my childhood in Hong Kong, and how a film about memory became a meditation on Jewish inheritance.
The piece explores my father’s escape from Aleppo, my childhood in Hong Kong, and the moment I realized that a film about memory had become something deeply Jewish.
Recent Interview
I recently spoke with Emily Frances on i24 News about memory, art, and the origins of Projecting Aleppo, as well as my previous film See Memory, now airing on PBS.