Arts diary: 'Syria is your home, it's your family. It's difficult to leave it under any circumstances'

Leading Syrian actress Reem Ali's first film as a director, the documentary Zabad, was due to get its premiere in Edinburgh last night. The film tells the story of a married Syrian couple, agonising over emigrating from the country.

They are the daily carers of the wife's schizophrenic brother, and they cannot bear to leave. "The only way he can survive is through their care of him," Ali says.

Ali, 34, trained at the Institute for Drama and Theatre in Damascus, and went on to star in prize-winning films like Dreaming Vision, and the Syrian television series the Letters of Love and War.

Zabad, her first film, was made at a time when she, too, considered emigrating. "In the end it's saying that it's your home, it's your family, it's difficult to leave it under any circumstances," she says.

Would she consider leaving Syria now? "No," she says emphatically. It was easy to travel to Edinburgh from Damascus, she says. "I'm here for a very short time."

Made in 2008, Zabad was banned in Syria and subsequently withdrawn from a Tunisian film festival under pressure from the Syrian Government. Ali is currently working on a new film, driven by the feeling that she "wasn't singing any more in her life". She is researching "screaming songs" in Syria, "to find how people express themselves in song through pain and sadness".

Zabad is part of the Reel Festival 2011, devoted to films, poetry and music from Syria and Lebanon and sponsored by the British Council Scotland.

The British Council said yesterday it has finally managed to contact several musicians it had invited from the troubled city of Dar'aa, after phone lines were disconnected for three weeks, but they will not be able to travel here. Live recordings of their work will be played instead.

Two further documentaries, by the late Syrian director Omar Amiralay, are showing tonight. In the 1970s Amiralay heralded former President Hafez Al-Assad's modernising drive in his film, Essay on the Euphrates Dam, celebrating the construction of a new dam as the pride of the Baath Party. Thirty years later he returned to the subject, with a very different approach, after the collapse of the Zayzun Dam killed dozens of people. A Flood In Baath Country explored the disaster's devastating impact on a Syrian village. The two films are screening together.

The festival was planning to welcome Amiralay here, but he died earlier this year, aged 67, a few days after signing a declaration supporting the protests in Egypt. A decade ago the French-trained director joined 98 Syrian intellectuals in signing the Declaration of the 99, demanding the release of all political prisoners and an end to the state of emergency.

• The Reel Festival runs until Sunday, see www.reelfestivals.org