Longtime Syrian friends Qusay Awad and Nabil Altawi share a close intimacy in their Berlin apartment against the backdrop of the Syrian Revolution and Arab Spring, beginning in the early 2010s. Through the juxtaposition of archival footage of violent atrocities and moments of the friends’ lives away from the conflict, filmmaker Rand Abou Fakher crafts a lyrical docufictional portrait of existence, distance, friendship, physical connection, and how the body holds trauma. Why Do I See You in Everything? made its world premiere in the Harbour strand of the 2026 International Film Festival Rotterdam.
In this new article format, which we view as also in dialogue with this film’s format in particular, Federica Giampaolo and Olivia Popp engage in an informal discussion of films through the medium of voice notes, which we then transcribed into a full conversation.
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OP: To start off, I’d like to speak about the title, because it’s evocative in the sense that it holds a conventionally romantic sentiment. It’s even in this Internet meme that’s like, “everywhere I go, I see her face”. Here, it’s transposed onto a close friend. This isn’t to say it’s a sentiment that you can’t have for a friend. Often, people speak of friendship breakups being more emotional than romantic breakups. The title has this sort of epistolary feel. It’s as if the film itself is a love letter to a friend, from one man to another or between the two men. To me, the idea of a reminder, or seeing someone in something else, implies an absence—and if not, absence, then a deep closeness that you recognise this person in the world around them in ways that aren’t necessarily explicit or overt. It might apply to physical objects, or it might apply to events. If there’s a protest or event that’s happening, it might harken back to the memory or feeling of a specific person being there with you. It creates this idea of distance, too, embedded in the title.
FG: My first impression was the fact that physicality was the focus of the film. The demonstrations and other footage proved the reality that they were showing, alternating between what was actually happening in the situation in Syria and getting closer to each other. The trauma experienced by people in the archival footage is so physical—we’re talking about protests and brutality, for instance. They react physically, as a consequence, and their bodies become shared with each other. There was a lot of touching, caressing, and comforting. Emotions are shown physically, and the body plays a main part..
OP: I agree that the physical caregiving feels key—it’s a male friendship that is more corporeal than viewers might expect. It transcends conventions of masculinity that society has put into place. That reminds me of Manoel Dupont’s Before/After, which we covered at Karlovy Vary in 2025, which also looks into this. It’s two men experiencing something really strong together, and that brings them closer together in a way that allows them to explore a connection as a snapshot in time, focused on intimate touch that isn’t overtly romantic or sexual. They are able to share this moment because they have a bonded experience. I think that’s very intriguing to speak about in a queer context, because it’s not saying that these people are in a relationship. It’s bending what it means to have a platonic relationship, especially between men.
FG: It’s more like people who went through the same thing, an unbreakable bond, an affection that we’re not really used to giving in the context of masculinity, culture, and many aspects. It’s beautiful how memory is portrayed through a relationship that is not really defined much by the identity behind it, socially. I also think the distance is given by how it portrays what happened and what is going on now after the events in Syria. When we have the footage of the revolution, being footage of a live rendition of the events, it has a shaky feeling. There’s an impossibility of breathing. Meanwhile, the current events of the friends are more like still images. They feel just as anxious as the other footage, but in a different way. There is a distance from the place and people and memories and trauma, and it lingers.
OP: Another aspect connected to distance that stuck out to me is the act of witnessing, which is immensely powerful in this film—not merely because of the atrocities that are captured on the CCTV cameras, but also the twisting of perspectives. We open with the voiceover of one friend not wanting the other to witness what he’s going through. There’s a different kind of trauma in witnessing. The film is very much would I would describe as a poetic Harbour documentary—when you say Rotterdam Harbour, a lot of films fall into this poetic mode of storytelling that’s sometimes essayistic, too. Reading the film not merely as a cinematic product but also as a multi-layered and multi-formed product: a letter to somebody else gives it a very interesting secondary and tertiary meaning for viewers who might not relate to this specific scenario but will absolutely relate to finding resonance frequencies between their environment and someone they love.
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Watch the trailer for the film here:
