"Maesmak" means, "what's your name?" in Arabic. "Maesmak" is a meditative exploration of one day spent in Rutba in late 2002, to plant an olive tree against the war, just before the invasion of Iraq. Production Note: In our journey around the Mediterranean, ten countries in total (Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, France, Italy, Greece) their borders, and 9.000 kilometers in 39 days - we stopped at Rutba a few weeks before the invasion of Iraq to plant an olive tree for peace. This movie tries to travel towards a "feeling"; the one with which we all came back home. A few years after the actual journey, l made a pilgrimage into memory and oblivion of the one day spent in Rutba. The symbolic planting, the offering of olive saplings, allows for the revelation of different hidden sides of our world to appear - bringing a mosaic of images to traveler and spectator alike. The narration of the film does not comment on reality. It records alike moments that are important and trivial, mundane and surreal, moving and harsh, just and unjust, letting them exist and vanish, a world enhanced through the lens of a doctor working with the terminally ill. His words become the leitmotiv of the movie like a in a song. In the end, each one of us keeps in the inner eyes the images and sentiments that have meant something for them. Our usual abstract perceptions of that world materialize gradually through a journey that becomes personal. Director’s Note: In a culture where a name expresses not only identity and origin, but also existence, and where being nameless is a serious insult, “Maesmak” makes us question our understanding of death and our valuation of human life - especially in the disastrous context of the invasion of Iraq. In “Maesmak”, the allegory of working with the terminally ill expands our perception of memory. Memory is, therefore, neither perception nor conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time. And in a lapse of time, memory can extend into a distance for a pilgrimage towards Rutba. “Maesmak”, in one state of flux, is my pilgrimage reconstructed out of Arabic key words. These words emerge out of this act of reminiscence like a blink between frames. Then they become facts of a fragmentary state of war and finally mature into silent words, like a confession on the faces of a chorus of young girls. In “Maesmak” this narrative approach is made possible by layering three different types of narration, the traveler’s as a living experience, the doctor’s as rational impressions, and the storyteller’s as active poetry.