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Sight and Sound

Essential viewing in the age of austerity

Sean McAllister’s deceptively casual documentary about a warehouse worker bringing hip-hop to kids in Hull reveals uncomfortable truths about inequality in the UK.

The hard facts of social mobility in today’s Britain come into sharp focus in this unassumingly scaled yet hugely encompassing piece of documentary portraiture. Filmmaker Sean McAllister, recently acclaimed for the affecting A Syrian Love Story, returns to home ground for A Northern Soul, having been appointed creative director of the opening ceremony marking his native Hull’s term as 2017 City of Culture. After years of austerity and a divisive Brexit vote, he ponders in an introductory voiceover, might this be the moment to turn the place around after decades of neglect. If so, what are the chances for someone trying to follow in his own footsteps? McAllister left school at 16 and worked in a factory for nine years before taking up a video camera and changing his life. In warehouse worker Steve Arnott, he finds a kindred soul: here’s someone who wants to transform his fortunes – and help others do the same – through the liberating power of hip-hop, but is faced with the suffocating pressures of exactly what it means to be among the UK’s many working poor.

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See the full review by Trevor Johnston on the BFI Sight & Sound website

‘A Northern Soul’: Sheffield Review

Screen Daily

Sean McAllister follows up A Syrian Love Story with an eye-opening look at his hometown of Hull

“A Northern Soul is about individuals and aspirations but it also becomes a film that speaks of poverty, class, a Britain in transition and what hope there is of a better future. That might feel like a tall order but McAllister delivers with confidence in his material and the conviction that ordinary lives matter.” – Allan Hunter

See the complete review on the Screen Daily website

A Northern Soul

The Guardian

Class and chance collide in Sean McAllister’s brilliant Sheffield Doc/Fest opening film, as young performers are guided through their home’s transformational year as UK city of culture

A Northern Soul functions brilliantly on both a political and emotional level. At no point is anyone patronised or pitied, and much of British TV and film could learn a lot from how McAllister makes films about poverty and working-class characters. This film may not be the most beautiful looking or sounding film, but it doesn’t matter. It’s a personal cry for social mobility of the kind McAllister himself benefited from, and a demonstration that given an opportunity, northern working-class people can and will make and engage in culture for themselves.

You can read the full review in our reviews section.

The National

Labour of love: Director Sean McAllister reveals heartache behind A Syrian Love Story

In 2009, British filmmaker Sean McAllister planned to shoot a documentary about revolutionary stirrings in Syria, at a time before most his countrymen had heard of – or cared about – what was happening in Damascus.

But after six years of filming, what he ended up with was A Syrian Love Story, a candid record of the experiences of a couple and their children as the civil war erupted and they became refugees in Europe. The couple, Amer Daoud and Raghda Hassan, at first are very much in love but are slowly torn apart as they are haunted by memories from a homeland they can’t forget.

Read the full article on the www.thenational.ae website

Film of the Week

A Syrian Love Story

McAllister here conjures a mosaic of footage which can be variously read as hidden-camera investigation, socio-political treatise, fly-on-the-wall family drama, proto-feminist case study, and (most affectingly) child’s-eye view of adult trauma.

This is a profoundly moving account of two love stories: that between the film’s central couple, Amer and Raghda, who are torn apart by imprisonment and exile; the other being their love for Syria, which casts a long shadow over their lives, their marriage and their children.

See the complete review by Mark Kermode in the Guardian website

Morning Star

A Syrian Love Story

This heart-wrenching film gives an idea of the human cost of seeking asylum in Western Europe

AS WE continue to witness the worst refugee crisis since WWII, this powerful documentary by Sean McAllister puts a human face on the issue as it recounts the personal cost to one Syrian family. When the British film-maker first met Amer in 2009 in Syria, just before the Arab spring, his wife Raghda was a political prisoner while he was caring for their four sons alone. Filmed over the following five years, the film tells the poignant story of how they were torn apart by events and the untold pressures which affected their family and marriage.

See the complete review by Maria Duarte in the Morning Star

The Times

A Syrian Love Story

Sean McAllister’s intimate, achingly poignant documentary couldn’t be more timely.

A Syrian Love Story follows the fates of Amer, his wife Raghda and their three sons. When McAllister first encounters the Syrian family, before the flames of the Arab spring have begun to flicker, Amer is raising his children alone and Raghda is in prison. Her crime? Writing a book about her romance with her husband, which
started behind bars, 20 years before, when they were both incarcerated as political prisoners.

See the complete 4 Star review (subscription required) by Wendy Ide in The Times

Time Out

A Syrian Love Story

Intimate and moving doc, shot over five years, following one family fleeing Syria as refugees

‘A Syrian Love Story’ presents us first with the gnawing anxiety of life under the ruthless Al-Assad regime, then the fresh challenges of a fractious, painful exile where damaged minds take time to heal, before we finally see the household become distant observers to the destruction of their homeland and the deaths of many friends.

See the full review by Trevor Johnston in Time Out [London]

HeyUGuys

A Syrian Love Story

A wonderful, powerful piece of filmmaking

For anyone who has felt outraged by the dehumanisation of refugees across the media, A Syrian Love Story is a welcome tonic. Filmed over 5 years, the film documents the relationship between Raghda and Amer. Ragdha is released from prison after serving time for her activism against the Assad regime in Syria, and this is where the film begins.

See the full review by Nia Childs on the HeyUGuys website

The Hollywood Reporter

A Syrian Love Story

A Syrian Love Story is another remarkable chapter in the English director’s journalistic forays into the Middle East’s hottest hot spots

Here again McAllister plays the role of the (mostly) off-screen reporter who is so thoroughly embedded in the life of his subjects that he seems like a member of the family. Though at first the story is told through Amer’s sad eyes and his halting but poetic English, Raghda eventually is given a voice and emerges as an extraordinary woman in her own right, torn — as Amer perceptively remarks — between being Che Guevara and a mother.

See the complete review by Deborah Young in The Hollywood Reporter