“A scattershot film that shows that love is perhaps the best form of resistance.”

A bizarre scene opens Rand Abou Fakher’s debut Why Do I See You in Everything?, a confusing hybrid feature about displacement and the destructive nature of power and masculinity. We see a column of trucks driving along a desert highway, each carrying one or two full-grown trees. It is a metaphor for being uprooted, for theft of land, for the erasure of history. It’s a powerful image, even if shot on a low-quality cell phone camera. The location is Syria, an arena of bloody violence for over a decade now. History repeats itself, and Fakher’s protagonists Nabil and Qusay, friends and lovers, witness this firsthand in a film whose chaotic rhythms and inability to piece it all together into a coherent message mask a powerful and empathetic portrayal of a relationship between two lost souls during its more quiet moments of male intimacy.

Cell phone images make up a large part of the film. It is not always clear if either of its protagonists actually shot these, but compounded by CCTV footage Fakher constructs a narrative around this collection of images that starts in August of 2011 with filmed protests against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, at the time still ruling the country with an iron fist. Nabil is part of a group of people taking to the streets of their hometown As-Suwayda, filmed from a window by Qusay, as the latter explains the situation in emphatic voice-over. Years later the two men find themselves in the safety of their small apartment in Berlin, but violence is never far away, not even in this supposed safe haven. Here too, peaceful protests are struck down viciously. “What bothers me the most is the silence of all humanity,” says Qusay in a moment of despair, expressing a feeling of powerlessness that has overcome many a person when looking at the news coming out of Gaza over the past two years. Nabil is arrested on the streets of Berlin during a pro-Palestine rally, filmed by his partner. History repeats itself.

When the Syrian Civil War takes a decisive turn, Nabil resolves to return to his home country, hoping to help liberate their town from the scourge of Assad’s power. Now it is Nabil taking the camera with him, while Qusay has to follow him from afar. Nabil witnesses an attack on the Druze community in As-Suwayda and again finds himself in the center of violence, this sensitive soul caught in a seemingly never-ending cycle. When the film makes its final leap forward, the two men have reunited in their olive grove between Syria’s volcanoes. The trees form a recurring pattern in the film, perfect metaphors for something old that has taken root and doesn’t let go so easily. Much like the people tending them, they will come back up.

Why Do I See You in Everything? is a challenging film because Fakher does not provide much context for the images, which initially makes it hard to work out a timeline. The images, shaky as they are, do little to invite the viewer in without information on what exactly is being shown. Context can only be inferred and is never explicitly stated. This makes the film a restless doc, only calming down when we see Nabil and Qusay in the safety of their Berlin apartment. There the tenderness and affection gives the film an anchor, but the jumbled nature of the images makes things confusing. Nabil is comforting Qusay, but only several fragments later do we understand they are in Berlin, even though Qusay already laments the world’s indifference to Gaza before we see them in the Berlin protests, finally recognizing Nabil’s arrest because he is wearing the same sweatpants.

That said, Fakher provides a working counterbalance to the chaos of protests and wars through the caresses and soothing words of Nabil in their few moments together, especially in the film’s final scenes when the two men are back in their olive grove post-Civil War. It portrays their bond as strong as ever, unbroken by the madness of the surrounding world even though that madness affects them. It is a tender ending to a scattershot film that shows that love is perhaps the best form of resistance, the one thing that violence can’t crush.