Evocations of the tragedy of Palestine permeate the basic storylines to build dramatic resonance, but also to defy and subvert its appropriation in the discourse of the regime. In Malas’ al-Leil, the main character is a man trying to recover the lost memory/biography of his father, a peasant who had voluntarily joined the ranks of rebels – as did hundreds of peasants in the region – in the 1936 Great Revolt in Palestine. As the young man endures humiliation in his own life, his troubles echo the hardships that his father endured after he settled in Quneitra. The film does not aim at restoring heroism to forgotten heroes, far from it: with humility and eloquence, it gives the tragedy of Palestine and its struggle for liberation the face of a peasant, the figure of a man, his wife and his son. The loss of his memory/biography is an erasure from the script of official history – self-congratulating and triumphalist.

Rasha Salti, Insights into Syrian Cinema, Rattapallax Press/Arte East, New York 2006

My cinematic generation didn’t just come up with a topic or address an issue, but I can safely state that we managed to establish our own language. And this wasn’t a traditional language. […] With al-Leil I had an opportunity to lay the foundation for a structure that was entirely mine. I dedicated 20 years of my life to talking about this ancestral home of mine, Quneitra, with all its nightmares and dreams, with every vision that I developed into film, and carried from one film to another, with the purpose of composing a visual, sentimental and personal work. This is, as Tarkovsky calls it, a carving of history. This is a search for time from a personal perspective, not just a historical perspective. To me, the time of that vague love for the ancestral home, towards the mother and the lost father, and to the political era, which is also lost, or Quneitra in al-Leil – all of this is an attempt to express that pain, that loss, which pierces your connection to reality with the peculiar flavours of alienation and longing.

Mohammad Malas, The Cinema of Muhammad Malas, in Vision of a Syrian Auteur, edited by Samirah Alkassim, Nezar Andary, Palgrave MacMillan, London 2018