“Odysseus was forced to march to a war. I was forced to march away from war. It felt like we met on the Aegean Sea. I was sailing from Anatolia to Hellas. He was sailing from Hellas to Anatolia”. This is how the voice-over of Catacombs begins, intertwining the filmmaker’s fate with that of the hero of the Odyssey. Told in chapters and fragments between two worlds, the image becomes a portal—both magical and tragic—between exile and his Ithaca: a Syria left unrecognisable and devastated, glimpsed at last upon his return.