From it we created you tells the story of the friendship between two young girls, Sanà and Eva. Through their dialogue, we learn about Sanà's family history: her grandparents Mariam and Aboulkheir, originally from Syria, have been political exiles in Italy for fifty years. Here, they not only built their family, but also founded and led the Islamic community in Italy and Europe.
When Assad's dictatorship falls in 2024, Mariam and Aboulkheir return to Syria and Sanà sets foot in her homeland for the first time. Aboulkheir reunites with Abu-Jamal, his 96-year-old brother who survived torture and bombing. Amidst the rubble, Eva experiences the wounds of a people in order to contribute to the construction of a monument to the tragedy of the Syrian people. Back in Italy, they struggle with the construction of a multicultural Italy and the complexity of being a diaspora.
From it we created you takes shape through the friendship between Eva and Sanà and the encounter of their differences. This intimate bond opens the way to a journey toward a Syria finally freed from dictatorship. The closeness of their bodies and gazes, so different from one another, may appear utopian, yet it embodies what Sanà’s family has fought for across generations: a form of coexistence grounded in respect, freedom, and equality among different cultures and faiths.
The film is born out of an urgency to bear witness — to tell not only of tragedy, but also of life, of love stories and trust that endure within History itself. The defeat of dictatorships seems to lie precisely in the resilience of human bonds, those that no war, distance, or fear can manage to break.
Eva wishes to meet Abu-Jamal and the family who remained in Syria, to see what is left, to touch the traces of war, and to confront a reality that is often removed from European consciousness. The city of Sanà’s grandparents, Al Tal, just a few kilometers from Saydnaya — a symbol of torture and disappearance — holds, among its ruins and stories, a fragment of Sanà’s identity and perhaps of the violence of our own time.
