The evening of June 10, 2020, was a joyful celebration of the journey of this event, which succeeded in being a warm evening every month for the friends of the cultural salon.

On Tuesday, June 9, we gathered at the Nation Building Movement office, huddled around a new photo that had a large share of stories, as part of the competition launched by the movement during the quarantine period, hoping to keep visitors to this club in touch with each other and with the Syrian memory and its visual archive that enriches the evenings with beautiful photos.​

Before announcing the winning story, some friends shared with us their stories, as they were reading for the first time in the Photo Stories Salon. After that, it was the turn of the judging committee, formed of the Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa and the literary critic Fakhr Zidane, to provide a quick reading of the participating stories, how to award grades and choose the winning story, and the artistic and aesthetic criteria that were followed, and to add the audience voting grades to know the final winner.

The winning story was titled “A Family Without Males” by our friend Laila Halabi, who was present to read her story and receive her gift.

The gift, which was a piece of art from the spirit of the stories, was specially prepared by a specialized artist for this competition. It was a “Photo Stories” album made of natural leather and wood, hand-stitched in the Japanese style. Its pages were also made of dried roses and other elements from nature. It included between its pages the pictures that were the lanterns of the stories, over a period of eighteen months, with a small glimpse into the history of each picture.