In 1970, a young Syrian filmmaker, filled with revolutionary fervor, made a beautiful film-poem to celebrate the great strides his nation was making toward modernization. The fifteen-minute black-and-white film that opens this program (Film Essay on the Euphrates Valley) shows men and machines, captured by the eye of a brilliant film artist, wholeheartedly dedicated to accomplishing a heroic task. Thirty-five years later, the same filmmaker, Omar Amiralay, returns to the site of his first film, this time to atone for this "error of youth". The dam whose construction he depicted has collapsed. A government report indicates that all the dams constructed by the Baath party after it came to power, will meet a similar fate. (The Baath party in Syria was a branch of Saddam Hussein's in Iraq.) In the village of Al-Machi, Amiralay looks unblinkingly at what has become of the dream of Arab socialism. Far from creating a work of flat political denunciation, he has gone beyond simply expressing his own disillusionment and captured, no less chillingly because he has done it elliptically, a glimpse of an educational system so regimented it seems beyond belief. A rare contemporary example of filmmaking combining formal mastery with political courage.