Hassan Akkad: Home is Safety

Hassan Akkad is a Bafta award-winning filmmaker, photographer and Refugee Rights Activist, who at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, famously started working as a frontline NHS worker, cleaning Covid wards at Whipps Cross hospital in East London. Hassan’s uniquely impactful brand of activism in the past year has single handedly resulted in U turns from the Government on some of their most hostile and inhumane attempts to remove rights and protection from NHS workers, refugees and their families during the pandemic.  The purpose of this series is to explore the multidimensional ways in which Human beings can expand the vessels of themselves enough to contain and live alongside their experiences of loss- which of course are not just limited to bereavement. Because, human beings don't just grieve people; one of the most life defining losses we can go through, is the loss of the place that is both the most profound and mundane in each of our lives- this place, is home- a place it is said you can't understand the foundational profundity of, until you lose it. In 2012. Hassan was forced to leave his home, in Damascus, Syria, which was being decimated by civil war, where he had stayed, until he experienced a series of indescribably traumatic imprisonments, which made it impossible to remain, yet agony, to leave. They are experiences Hassan describes as “having inflicted permanent physical and emotional scars on his body.”Hassan’s forced decision to leave his home has led him on an extraordinary emotional, physical and geographical journey, which has spanned deserts, mountains and oceans in both a metaphorical and literal sense. A journey, defined by his courage, humanity, his quest for safety and for this profound and perfectly ordinary thing called home.Created and hosted by Jess MillsCreative co-production by Bonny TydemanProduced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.