An Invitation to Grieve

My experience at Arab Film Fest’s CATHARISIS

Eva Basile

Nowadays, I am constantly reminded of the ways in which humanity is fractured. Perhaps it is that physical push out of routine that can rebuild our hope of this world.

There is a certain beauty in the ways people hold grief—how it shapes us, how it forces us into familiar patterns. Not beauty in the suffering itself, but in how the human spirit insists on shaping meaning from it, insisting on expression when silence could consume. Grief so unimaginable to me that all I can do is watch it move around me, pressing at the edges of the room and my understanding. I am an outsider here, watching steam rise from bodies, smoke curl through the air, feeling the weight of my notebook as I jot down notes about the event. Quietly, I slip it into my bag.

Empathy is often described as listening, as sitting with another’s story until their sorrow becomes something you can almost touch. But listening has limits. To see grief unfold in its rawest form, to be surrounded by its sound and weight, is something else entirely. The music deafens me in its unfamiliar rhythm.

Here, grief is heavier than extended shots of ruined homes, last words spoken to a camera, or a red brushstroke across torn canvas. It saturates every sense. It invites me in, even as it reminds me of my distance. That distance is my inheritance: a Wisconsin childhood where grief was quiet, where life unfolded in safe patterns.

What appeared to be a party revealed itself as CATHARSIS. Lights fractured across mirrored walls, colors clung in smoke, bass pulsed through bodies pressed close. Pain found release in motion, in shouts, in rhythm carrying sorrow outward. I stood apart, unsure if I belonged—until I realized: this too was an invitation. To witness. To feel my own smallness. To believe grief, when shared, can be remade into hope. And maybe in that remaking, the fractures of humanity can begin to heal.