Time, grief, and hope on film

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeFilm SymposiumTime, grief, and hope on film Comment on Unwritten Letters. 2020. Max Bloching and Abd Alrahman Dukmak, directors. Distributed by The Royal Anthropological Institute.Yasmin FeddaYasmin FeddaQueen Mary University of London Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThere is an intangible feeling of time passing that film captures, both when filming and in the edit. In documentary, with real people’s lives, we capture moments, feelings, sounds. A random thing that someone did or said. You catch their love of language, their poetry, the beauty or tension of a moment of life. As a filmmaker you hold onto these precious moments, you rewatch them, listen to them multiple times, and handle them with a lot of care and attention. After all, it is these fragile moments that make up your film.In Unwritten Letters, directed by Max Bloching and Abd Alrahman Dukmak, Abd, the main protagonist, tells Max “I want to see ‘my film’ in this film.” Abd is a twenty-four-year-old Syrian, who took part in the early days of the 2011 revolution and now lives in Padua, Italy. Together with his friend Max they make a film. As they are exploring how to turn Abd’s reality in Italy into a film, Abd is revisiting his past and diving into possible futures. Unwritten Letters documents the story of a young Syrian man arriving in Europe and his process in making sense of who he is through film and friendship.This is a film of fragments, of time moving slowly. It also incorporates the process of editing within the film, revealing the tensions of making sense of the fragments of footage. Max had met Abd in Beirut and as their friendship grew so did the idea of working on a film. For Abd the process of working on this film was an opportunity to come to terms with some of his recent experiences of leaving Syria, of losing dear friends, of moving to Italy to start a new life. He shared with Max letters he had written to his friend Zean, who had died, and in these letters Abd wrote fantastical and positive updates of what had happened since his friend’s death. Max became inspired to use these letters in the film. As Max says, “Over time the process of shooting and writing Unwritten Letters turned into a collaborative research of somewhat ritualistic character; a research not only into Abd’s experience of migration, but into the practice of shared authorship and collaboration itself. Co-directing with the protagonist was both a challenge and fortune as it forced us to question and negotiate our perceptions and our cinematic construction of ‘the real.’” I would add to that that it was also a process of negotiating how to keep contributors to a film complex and three dimensional, in this case done in collaboration with that contributor. Abd watched himself on screen many times, re-editing, writing, and recording. As Abd says “I ask myself, how can you keep engaging with your own story for two years of your life? … After watching the footage and now the rough cut so many times, I started to find a way to go through this life and live it in a satisfactory or honest manner—at least with myself.”There is a sense of waiting, of time feeling slow in the film. Change happens, but at its own pace. At one point Abd says he feels like he is waiting, but he is not sure for what. Although it was not explicitly stated in the film, I felt a sense of grief throughout. Maybe the making of this film was in part a process of grieving. Maybe Abd is waiting to come to terms with leaving his country, of losing dear friends.Time is an elusive thing to catch, but is something I reflect on a lot. With filmmaking, time passing is first captured on film. Then the time it takes until you watch and edit that footage is another layer of time passing. The person/s you filmed may not remember the moments you captured. Their lives have moved on, they no longer live the moments in which they were filmed, they may no longer be alive. And when you make films in the contexts of constantly shifting realties of forced migration, of conflict, and specifically Syria after 2011 and the revolution, the weight of time passing is both fast and slow. And the meaning of our footage can change in unexpected ways. An important note: by “Syria” I mean Syrian subjects broadly, who are in and of the wider world, and not only located inside its national borders. This includes a geopolitical understanding (many players were involved in Syria); also, many Syrians live and are connected to many parts of the world, whether due to recent or historical migrations. And there were many noncitizens of Syria (including the large Palestinian community, and others) living in Syria who were, and are, very much a part of its fabric.In my own film, Queens of Syria (2014), this context of changing realities over time affected the film process. This film tells the story of fifty women from Syria, all forced into exile in Jordan, who came together in autumn 2013 to create and perform their own version of The Trojan Women, the timeless ancient Greek tragedy all about the plight of women in war.What followed was an extraordinary moment of cross-cultural contact across millennia, in which women born in twentieth-century Syria found a blazingly vivid mirror of their own experiences in the stories of a queen, princesses, and ordinary women like them, uprooted, enslaved, and bereaved by the Trojan War.Through the making of this film, I learned and used the idea of dynamic consent. Not exactly a full creative collaboration like in Unwritten Letters, but a form of collaboration that hinged on trust. During filming the context was constantly evolving, especially because of questions around fear, safety, what can or should be filmed (or not). For example, I had filmed one woman (pseudonym Laila) who shared her story about how she resisted regime forces in her village. Her teenage son was arrested, and they didn’t have any news of his fate. She was then displaced to Jordan. She found the process of the theatre workshops cathartic but ended up dropping out due to security fears for her son, fearing that her contribution in the play or film, once public, might affect him in prison. A year later when I was editing, I called her to ask if I could use some of her contributions in the film before she had dropped out. Her reality had changed so much in that time. Her son had been tortured to death and she told me she was no longer scared. She now wanted her contributions included. Although the fate of her son was not implicitly nor explicitly in that footage, those small fragments of footage I have of her changed meaning, and it was important to her for me to use those fragments, to say “this is me, this happened to me,” much as Abd in Unwritten Letters shares his experiences and difficulties.A strange process can happen when you edit, however. The individuals in your film might ossify, becoming two dimensional “characters” simplified through the process of editing and the tension of trying to find a narrative. David MacDougall (1999: 42) reflected that “the filmmaker observes the hardening shell of a film persona, replacing the living person. There is both simplification and atrophy.” How do we resist this process of simplification and atrophy? How do we retain the complexity of a human being, while struggling with content, context, meaning? The fragments of someone’s life, through time and lots of editing, perhaps no longer reflect who they are as living people. More optimistically, Michael Channan (2008: 128) says “film as such is always made up of images that are never more than fragments, in which history itself is invisible, an absent cause … accessible only through textual reconstruction. This textual reconstruction is the work of montage.” The process of editing, how these fragments are woven together, is a richly revealing stage of filmmaking. It was time and montage that allowed me to use Laila’s contribution, to give it meaning, so it was not only a fragment. Max and Abd in Unwritten Letters reveal the time they took over editing to give their fragments meaning.Wating, time passing, and grief are part of my last feature film Ayouni (2020). It is a film that took seven years to make. In it Noura and Machi search for answers about their loved ones—Bassel Safadi and Paolo Dall’Oglio, who are among the over one hundred thousand forcibly disappeared in Syria. Faced with the limbo of an overwhelming absence of information, hope is the only thing they have to hold on to. “Ayouni” is a deeply resonant Arabic term of endearment—meaning “my eyes” and understood as “my love.” Filmed over six years and across multiple countries in search of answers, Ayouni is an attempt to give numbers faces, to give silence a voice, and to make the invisible undeniably visible.This is a film very much made of fragments, especially the first half which is made up of archival material of Paolo and Bassel. Paolo Dall’Oglio is a Jesuit priest originally from Rome, who lived in Syria for thirty years. He spoke the Syrian dialect of Arabic, and was accepted as Syrian by many. He set up the interdenominational monastery Deir Mar Musa one and a half hours north of Damascus, based in an old church on a rocky outcrop. The community was made up of nuns and monks, and focused on interfaith dialogue. The monastery was very hospitable and welcomed visitors from all walks of life, including many Muslims. I had made several films there over the years, some with Paolo, and I had an archive of material. When the revolution began in 2011 Paolo was supportive of it and was eventually expelled from Syria for being so outspoken against the regime. He became very active after this, and I started a new film with him, this time about a revolutionary priest. He had visited Raqqa in July 2013, which had just been freed of regime forces, and was not yet taken over by ISIS, but they had some presence there. It was a delicate time. He had gone to negotiate the release of French journalists kidnapped by ISIS, and he himself was kidnapped.Bassel Safadi was a Palestinian Syrian hacker and open-source developer and member of Creative Commons whom I knew in Damascus. He had set up Syria’s first Hacklab. In 2011 he supported those filming in areas under siege, and he himself also filmed. He was arrested in March 2012 and was moved around various prisons. He was eventually taken to a civilian prison and was held there until 2015, where his wife, human rights lawyer Noura Ghazi Safadi, could visit him. He was taken from his cell in October 2015, and has not been seen since. Noura later heard he was executed, but has not seen his body or any evidence of what happened to him. Noura gave me some of his footage, as well as footage filmed by their friends, of them spending time together. These fragments of material captured moments of love between a young couple, of Bassel at protests or meeting journalists: they were all snippets. I needed to find a way to give them meaning.I used these personal archives for the first half of the film. After Paolo was kidnapped in 2013 in Raqqa, I revisited footage I had filmed with him in Syria in the early 2000s, in mini dv tapes that sat in a box. With his disappearance it became even more important to make a film where he was present, and not absent. I could conjure up Bassel and Paolo through these fragments, we could hear their voices, live with them monetarily, feel their presence. I had never imagined what meaning these fragile fragments could gain, that they could in a small way resist the crime of forcible disappearance that they were victim to and that has since silenced them.At the same time, I also followed the story of Noura and Machi, Paolo’s sister, as they wait and search for answers about their fates. All the real-time footage I filmed carried this sense of waiting, yet also hope. It is interesting reflecting on the different experiences that people have had in the face of tragedy: for Abd in Unwritten Letters death has perhaps made him feel he has stopped, for Noura it has propelled her, to build community, to push for answers, to advocate. For Machi, still not knowing any answers, she has decided to risk hope. In their different ways, they are all still waiting—for answers, for acceptance, for hope in a better future. Maybe what film can offer us is that space of time—to make, to reflect, to wait, to hope.ReferencesChannan, Michael. 2008. “Filming the ‘invisible.’” In Rethinking documentary: New perspectives and practices, 121–32. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarMacDougall, David. 1999. Transcultural cinema. Edited by Lucien Taylor. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarYasmin Fedda is a filmmaker and academic.Yasmin Fedda[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 12, Number 3Winter 2022 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/723736 © 2022 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.