Genre Animation

Step by Step (1978)

Item: Step by Step
Rating: 2.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★★½ — Step by Step (1978)

Sometimes a film stops you cold. Not because of a clever twist or a bravura set piece, but because of the sheer weight of what's being shown. Step by Step is one of those films. It's a Syrian production from 1978, and it does exactly what it says on the tin: it walks you through the lives and families of ordinary Syrians at the tail end of the seventies. No glamour, no escape. Just people, and the world pressing down on them.

I started my A-Z World Movie Challenge precisely because I wanted this. I wanted to sit with cultures I'd never spent time with on screen, to see how people live and love and struggle in corners of the world that rarely get a look-in at my local multiplex. Syria is my entry for "S", and I'll be honest, I didn't know what to expect. What I got was something raw and uncomfortable, and I'm still not entirely sure how to feel about it.

The cinematography here is rough around the edges in a way that feels entirely deliberate. There's no polish, no attempt to pretty things up. The camera watches these people with a kind of unflinching patience, and the bleakness of what it finds is genuinely striking. You're not being manipulated into feeling sad. The sadness is just there, sitting in the frame, matter-of-fact and heavy. That's actually harder to shake than any amount of swelling strings on the soundtrack.

The outlook the film carries is extraordinarily bleak. And that's the bit that keeps snagging in my mind. Because there's a question that always hovers over films like this: is the bleakness an honest reflection of life as it was lived, or is there an agenda shaping what we're shown and how? I can't fully answer that, partly because my knowledge of Syrian cinema from this period is limited, and partly because the film itself doesn't make it easy to disentangle observation from argument. What I can say is that it felt real. Whether it was complete is another matter.

It reminded me a little of my experience watching A River Called Titas (1973), another film from the challenge where the camera plants itself inside a community and refuses to look away from hardship. Both films share that quality of immersion without sentimentality. You're not being comforted. You're being shown.

And that's the thing with this challenge. Sometimes you watch a film and you come away buzzing, thrilled to have discovered something. Other times you come away quieter, a bit unsettled, carrying something you didn't quite have before. Step by Step is firmly in the second camp. I wouldn't call it an easy watch or even a fully satisfying one. The bleakness, while honest, doesn't leave much room to breathe, and I'd be lying if I said the film ever quite pulls together into something I'd call compelling cinema rather than simply a document.

Scoring it felt genuinely difficult. It's not a bad film. It's doing something real and worthwhile, and the fact that it left me unsettled is arguably a point in its favour. But I also can't in good conscience score it highly on the basis of discomfort alone. A straight average feels right. Two and a half stars. It's worth the watch if you're drawn to world cinema or if Syria is somewhere you've been thinking about more, as so many of us have over the past decade. Just be prepared to sit with what it gives you.

That's what the challenge is for, I suppose. Not every film from every country is going to be a hidden gem. Some of them are going to shake you, leave you a bit quiet, and make you grateful you looked.

Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1978 | Watched: 2025-09-09

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