Sixteen years ago, I was sixteen — a teenager in Damascus with a white desktop computer, a 56kbps modem, and an obsession with connection.
Every click, every pixel, every message that broke through my country’s firewalls felt like a victory — a small rebellion against isolation.
That first dial-up tone cost me my savings, my sleep, and eventually my computer — but it gave me the world.
It made me who I am.
This short film is about that journey — from the sound of a modem to the silence of 4K; from the boy who sent a single 2MB image across borders, to the man who now transmits moving images to the same world that once felt unreachable.
It’s a reflection on communication, freedom, and technology’s quiet revolution —
the story of how a 16-year-old found his voice online, and how that voice still travels today,
16 years later, through a 16mm lens that is no longer 16.
Roumani Line 