Growing Up Between Syria and England: The Stories That Live Inside a Family

ABOUT THE FILM
Location: England
Themes: Family · Identity · Belonging · Mixed heritage · Home · Grandparents · Family history · Memory · Generations
Film: Relatively Speaking
Filmmaker: Celia Peterson

There is something wonderfully unpredictable about filming a family together.

You can arrive with a list of questions about family history, childhood, identity and belonging. But quite often, the moments that tell you the most are the ones you could never have planned.

Someone interrupts. Someone corrects somebody else's version of events. A photograph appears and suddenly everyone remembers the same day completely differently. A story that has clearly been told a hundred times gets told for the hundred-and-first — accompanied by the same eye rolls, accusations and laughter.

That is where family history really comes alive.

When I filmed this British-Syrian family, I was interested in what it meant to grow up between two cultures, but also in something much simpler: what happens when you get several generations of a family in a room and give them the time to remember.

And, inevitably, to disagree.

The ordinary moments tell you everything

We often think documenting family history means recording the important facts. Where somebody was born. When they moved. Who married whom. Where the family came from.

Those things matter, of course. But they're rarely the things that make someone feel real.

Character emerges in the smaller moments.

It's in the way somebody tells a story. The person who can't resist interrupting. The family member who remembers every detail and the one who remembers absolutely none of it. The joke everybody understands without needing it explained.

When families are filmed together, these dynamics become part of the historical record too.

You're not simply preserving what happened.

You're preserving what people were like with one another.

And that feels increasingly important to me.

Growing up between Syria and England

At the heart of this family's story is an experience shared by many mixed-heritage families: growing up with more than one idea of home.

The children were half British and half Syrian, growing up in England with a Syrian father. Syria was part of their family identity, but for years it existed partly through stories, relatives and their father's memories.

Then they travelled there with him for the first time.

Suddenly the people they had heard about were standing in front of them.

There was the wider Syrian family to meet, new relationships to navigate and another culture to experience not as an abstract part of their heritage, but as ordinary daily life.

And it is the ordinary details that make their memories of that journey so lovely.

The cultural differences. The family dynamics. The misunderstandings. The humour of children encountering a place that is simultaneously unfamiliar and somehow already theirs.

Their father's Syria became their Syria too — although inevitably seen through completely different eyes.

Family photographs are rarely just photographs

Photographs played an important part in our conversation.

I love using old family photographs in documentary interviews because they have an extraordinary ability to unlock memories.

Put a photograph in front of somebody and you're no longer asking them to remember their childhood in the abstract. There is the house. There is their mother. There is the ridiculous outfit. There is the person who always stood slightly apart from everybody else.

One photograph can contain an entire network of relationships.

And once people begin talking around it, you often discover stories that nobody thought to write down.

How their parents met. What their grandparents were like. Who ruled the household. Who caused trouble. What Sunday afternoons felt like. Which traditions belonged to Britain, which came from Syria and which gradually became something particular to this family.

These are small memories.

Until they are gone.

Then they become priceless.

Preserving the people, not just the family tree

There are now countless ways to research our family history. We can build enormous family trees, search census records, trace migration and preserve thousands of photographs digitally.

But none of those things can quite capture the experience of sitting with somebody.

Their voice. Their expressions. Their sense of humour. The way siblings tease one another. The look between a parent and child when an old story resurfaces.

That is why I find intergenerational family documentaries so fascinating.

They don't just preserve information about a family. They preserve something of the relationships themselves.

And when different generations are filmed together, memories trigger other memories. One person's version prompts another. A grandparent remembers something a child has never heard. A son asks his father a question he might never otherwise have thought to ask.

Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do for your family history is simply create the space for those conversations to happen.

Because ordinary family life is not really ordinary at all.

It is full of migrations and marriages, arguments and reconciliations, cultural collisions, private jokes, grandparents, childhood adventures and stories that have travelled across countries and generations.

You just have to ask.

And preferably keep the camera rolling.

Every family has stories worth keeping.

If you'd like to preserve the voices, memories, photographs and relationships that make your family yours, find out more about our Family Documentaries - films made to be watched and passed down through generations.