Lifestyle
8.24.2021
The Syrian video shot in the middle of a blackout is a hit on YouTube
In Syria, the hit of the summer was shot in the dark! With more than 6 million views on Youtube, this funny staging for the Syrian band Safar, has been a hit with all its fans! And here are the real reasons for this unusual shooting.
The economic crisis in Syria is the reason for the darkness
The song is an Arabic love song, a modern melancholic ballad with a rhythmic beat, entitled Ya Weel Weely (“Oh, woe, my woe” in Arabic), which takes heartbreak as its theme. But while the lyrics are profound, it was the blackouts and low light that added the necessary romance to the video.
It is necessary to go back to the context to better understand why the artists decided to shoot their video in the dark.
Today, and for many years in Damascus, the economic situation and the crisis are getting worse. For many people, in the cities as well as in the countryside, electricity has become a scarce commodity and power outages can sometimes last more than twenty hours.
Embracing power cuts rather than ignoring them
When singer Shadi Safadi and the band he co-founded, “Safar“, thought of a low-budget video for their new song, the only way to avoid being defeated by power cuts was to embrace them.
The video, uploaded on 20 July, has already reached over 6 million views! For the Syrian website Enab Baladin, “it is rare to see a Syrian song being so successful”. For him, it’s definitely “a winning move for the group, which has remained in the shadows for twenty years”.
And not without a sense of humour! We then listen to the members of the group, squeezed into a small room, singing in adoration in front of a lamp, instruments and microphones decorated with coloured garlands of multiple LED bulbs… “True!!!” one can even read at the end of the video.
“The song was written with love and people definitely liked the lyrics and the music, but what touched our audience the most was the video” said Wafi Al Abbas, another founding member of the group.
A success that demonstrates the new Syrian aspirations
For director Yazan Shorbaji, a storyline that reflects people’s daily lives could be just as powerful to carry a love song.
The success of this song undeniably proves that there is an audience aspiring to new forms of art, independent of the traditions and the dominant model that production companies in the Arab world are trying to perpetuate…
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