2013, Helsinki. When my full-time job ended in December 2012 and I once again started thinking about what to do next, I had a dream about Syria in January. In that, a thousand people died in an earthquake in one day, there was an uproar in media for two weeks, and in the end 'Westerners' didn't care. If I dream about important names, I hear it several times and see written, big letters, clearly. Here the word was Damascus.
I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't remember what Damascus is. I had to Google it. Well, of course, the capital of Syria.
After a couple of months, my Syrian friend from Washington DC went to Beirut to visit her family in Lebanon. I decided to go see her and at the same time learn more about the situation in Syria. Right from the first meeting, I knew that I had to film these people, 'This is going to be a documentary.' That started a long journey of filming and friendships with refugees living outside the camps. Unfortunately, after 2.5 years I was so deep in debt and mentally tired of the constant death, pain and racism in Europe that I went to the Caribbean to snorkel for fish. The opposite of war.
At some point there was already talk of an 8-part series for Yle (national TV), but it would have required additional funding, which I didn't get from Finland or abroad. That's a long story in itself. Eight months after my dream, Assad's (president of Syria) forces bombarded their own citizens with chemical weapons. On 21st of August 2013, 1429 people died around Damascus, 426 of them children.
It became a political earthquake for a couple of weeks and then Westerners changed their interest to other topics.