If London Were Syria (Review) | Sweet and Short

Here at OBSCURAE, we've always championed short storytelling as the hunting ground for your next favourite filmmaker – and encouraged you not to skip the shorts programme! Welcome back to our Short film review series, Sweet and Short.

Back in 2014, I saw a video from the charity Save The Children called If London Were Syria – also known as “Most Shocking Second a Day Video”. Directed by Martin Sterling, it’s a super short film, but covers somewhere around sixty days from the perspective of Lily – a young, middle-class white girl – as the UK descends into a civil war.

A few years later, having totally forgotten the concept of Sterling’s film, I started documenting my own life in the same format (one second of video every day). I kept up with it for a few years, but then the habit lapsed until I started it up again at the start of this year.

And then, this week, If London Were Syria started making the rounds on social media again, and I watched it again, and I cried again. Besides the obvious relatability, there’s something about the verisimilitude of all the utterly British details that really gets to me. I’m actually pretty sure the film was shot (on an impressive number of locations) around East London, where I now live – and the school Lily attends looks eerily similar to one just down my road.

Before the lighting dims and the costumes become dirtier, there are terrifying snippets of dialogue interspersed throughout scenes of normality. “—Live ammunition—”, “—deserved to get shot—”, “—airstrikes on rebel positions—”. It’s a really impressive feat of subtle, effective storytelling, and by the end you find yourself staring back into Lily’s thousand-yard stare.

This two-minute short feels like a portent of what’s to come, but as the world seemingly becomes more and more violent, the final message of the film is only more relevant: “just because it isn’t happening here doesn’t mean it isn’t happening”. It’s happening now, and we have to look.