Al-Brokar … a series that embodies the story of the oldest Damascene industries

 Brokar,” the Brocade”, series  is one of three Syrian drama works that will be shown  in Ramadan this year after all  filming of several works came to a stop in response to the precautionary measures to prevent Corona virus. It presents the olden days  of Damascus in a different way, starting from the ancient Damascene brocade industry.

Screenwriter Sameer Hazeem said that “the Brokar” series is different from the rest of the works that depicted the former Damascene  way of living  in terms of subject matter and treatment.

The work events recount, according to the author, the events during 1942 during the French occupation of Syria. It talks about an attempt by a French engineer to steal the secrets of the brocade industry as well as the role of the Syrian woman in confronting the occupation  in addition to several  interesting stories related to the murder committed  in the neighborhood and the resulting events.

 Hazeem confirmed that the series would receive the highest viewing level, as he has chosen one of the most important and most ancient traditional Damascene industries through tales drawn from history where we find in the series that a Dutch princess chose a brocade for her wedding dress fabric instead of the British Queen Elizabeth II as is historically known.

The other side of choosing the brocade, according to Hazeem, lies in the fact that this cloth with its triple strands of silk, gold and silver is a reflection of the Syrian social fabric, while the issue of the French engineer’s attempt to steal the secret of this cloth occupies a smaller space of work.

The Syrians’ resistance to the French occupation in “Brokar “has a different approach according to the author of the series, as he criticizes individual and spontaneous heroic acts and stresses that resistance must be a collective, coordinated and organized action, especially when the occupation soldiers try to attack the girls who work in the brocade’s workshop.

Hazeem says that in “Brokar” he avoided delving into some of the customs, including tables, cooking, midwives, weddings, etc, which, as  he describes as free scenes that do not give any weight to the work, re-activating  the role of the storyteller, who narrates stories with moral lessons, some of which are fictional and others are inherited folk tales.

It is noteworthy that the screenwriter Sameer Ismail Hazeem is a lawyer, short story writer, and a scriptwriter born in 1954. He stayed for a period of time in America, where he wrote short stories, some of which were transformed into series. He has two contemporary works ready to be shot .

 “Brokar”  is directed by Muhammad Zuhair Rajab and produced by Qaband Art Production Company.

Amal Farhat