Interview with Rasha Salti

I will answer your second question first. Regardless of the current antics in diplomacy, with the republic of Turkey redefining its role in the region as a particularly astute and agile mediator between the US, the Quartet, the G-8 and the tormented “East”, in terms of the arts, culture and film specifically, I do think there is a genuine interest in the Middle East and North Africa among a generation –or two– of those who follow such things in Turkey at the moment. And I am not referring only to this forthcoming program at the Istanbul International Film Festival. A couple of years ago, the Mithat Alam Center hosted Omar Amiralay, Syria’s most radically dissident documentary filmmaker; in addition to film screenings, Amiralay gave a master-class. Last year, ArteEast was approached by a film festival in Mardin to propose a program of Syrian films. Mardin is culturally, historically, anthropologically connected to Syria, I know, but that request came in 2009, not in 2003 or 1997. And you do recall the last edition of the Istanbul biennial, and its thorough engagement with the region. It would be interesting to explore what has motivated this trend, obviously it could not be one thing or even a couple of things, life is much more complex (thankfully!), and I have learned to refrain from issuing summary judgment based on intuition and anecdotal observation.

I started by answering your second question first, as a prelude to the essential point I want to make, namely, the hosting of a program of films is not upon a top-down impetus of the “affirmative action meets foreign policy” sort. Even if the Istanbul International Film Festival is an established event, organized by a prominent foundation, and takes place in one of the most canonical thoroughfares of Istanbul that cuts through historically ‘multicultural’ neighborhoods experiencing radical gentrification today, the program is the crystallization of trends that have run through the grass-roots upward to the elite realms of high-art and to the mainstream.

The adage that represents culture and the arts as a realm of communication that mediates a more humane understanding of people across the globe is perhaps cliché but not untrue. The Middle East is regarded as an intense (and endemic) conflict zone, it features prominently on the news as a geographical territory where despair has deployed massively and captivated (and blinded) people’s hearts and minds, thus holding the promise of impending doom whose impact would bring disaster to the region as well as to the rest of the world. As such, Middle East film and the arts in general have suddenly circulated across the US and Europe remarkably more widely than before. Considering the unreliability of global dissemination of news, and post-modernity’s thinly veiled contempt for attributing contemporaneity to ‘developing’ countries, the artistry of filmmakers and the power or value of cinema as art has all too often been overcast by their virtues as providing carriers of information on the region, its wars, wounds and complexities. Cinema, as all other fields of artistic expression, involves the manufacture of representation and construction of narrative but one should first and foremost regard it as an art form, and neither a sociological or anthropological study, nor a political statement. Films don’t explain a situation, rather they complicate it.

What, in your opinion, are the advantages and disadvantages of showing these films together under a section?

Curating an arts program in general under the present circumstances of how production and showcase are structured and mediated is a bit of a mined terrain. On the one hand, funding and disbursal of other resources are now overwhelmingly shaped in the “regional” paradigm, or what I referred to above as “affirmative action meets foreign diplomacy”, and that sets a very narrow and flat framework for approaching audiences. What is the artistic value in saying here are new films from the Middle East? This view emphasizes the misconception of artists –filmmakers included– as first and foremost native informants of the societies from within which they produce work. The trick lies in undermining that paradigm and for that, there are a multitude of strategies, including the very selection of films, choosing or adding another title, one that gives another layer to the ‘regional’ framework, and proposing films that really complicate prevailing perceptions, as much as those in the mainstream, but also the more radical on the left or on the right. And finally, during the actual presentations of the films, in the direct or face to face conversations with the audience, opting to complicate the situation even further.

Would you like to say a few words about the title of the program ‘Enchanting Mutineers’?

‘Mutineers’ is odd, it is slightly old-fashioned, forgotten and somehow it throws back to the Hollywood classic Mutiny on the Bounty. In truth, I would have liked to use the attribute ‘insurgent’ but I had used it for one of the proposed titles for the Elia Suleiman tribute and so I needed a synonym. Since then, it has grown on me, and I like the incongruous association between ‘enchanting’ and ‘mutineers’, and the even more incongruous association with a program of recent films from the Middle East. In essence, the films selected in this program share a common virtue, namely, that they stand against conventions, they are at once dissident and provocative. They challenge prevailing modes of film production, representation and narrative, vocabulary of filmmaking, political discourse and engagement. At the same time, they articulate, each on their own, singular poetics, they restore faith in the power of cinema to imagine, another world, history, present, subjectivity, etc. In two words, the power of cinema to enchant.

Do the films you chose have anything in common other than being from the “same” region? For instance, is there a certain formal similarity or do they share certain narrative elements, evoke similar sentiments, share a similar political position etc.?

The region is made up of many countries, each with its own particular conditions, present and history. In the Arab world, there is a shared history, culture, cultural references and motifs, I don’t mean to undermine all that, it is important; equally important is to highlight the shared history and cultural motifs with Iran, off course they are more prominent in a country like Iraq, than Tunisia, by virtue of shared borders between the former, same as it is important to take stock of shared motifs in the countries that make up North Africa, versus the countries that make-up the Levant. The argument I am trying to make is simple: things are much more complex than is generally assumed. However, the selection is titled ‘Enchanting Mutineers’ in reference to the extent of the shared attributes in film production today. There are neither common narrative elements between the films that make up the selection, nor sentiments or political positions, as I said above, the intention is to complicate, not to simplify or explain, audiences should be able to appreciate ‘difference’ as intensely as ‘similarity’.

You have mentioned before that the image of the “screaming and crying Middle Easterner” has been disturbing you for while now. What kind of a picture to these films draw of the Middle East? How is this image different from the one that we get from other films or from visual media in general?

I am not sure what other films you have in mind; if you are referring to Hollywood’s representation of the Middle East, then it is as flawed as all of Hollywood’s representation of the world at large, including its own home country, the US. Mainstream cinema from the Middle East, produced for ‘popular’ consumption or for large box office returns, is also subservient to principles far removed from a real engagement with lived experience, or a genuine commitment to cinema as a medium for artistic expression or exploration. The conflicts that torment the quotidian of the Middle East and overcast its future with impending doom are mediated in broadcast news with images of hapless despair that seems locked in a logic of endemic violence or tireless conspiracy. Auteur and independent cinema presents an entirely different representation and narrative. In that regard, they are no different from their peers across the world, their motivations are the same, namely to craft their own poetics, a cinematic approach, transpose lived experience or a sense of being in the world specific to their subjectivity.

Considering the political conjuncture of the world today, do you think that the expectations of the “western” audience (especially festival audiences) has an effect on the distribution and exhibition of certain kinds of films from the Middle East? Could it even be possible that such expectations have an influence on the production of these films? If so, in what ways?

The notion of a “western audience” is slippery, I am sure you agree, it is predicated on a generalization that glosses over a lot of local realities. For instance, Middle Eastern films have found a means for commercial release (to varying degrees of success and wide dissemination) in France, but not in Sweden, Poland of Spain. This has to do with differences in systems of distribution and commercial release in France versus other European countries. Festival audiences are also something quite peculiar in European countries, they cannot be regarded as simply the regular film-going audience, in fact, they can be said to constitute the most visible (perhaps last) bastion of cinephilia. When films from the Middle East find their way to international film festivals, especially the very high-profile festivals like Cannes, Rotterdam, Venice, Locarno or the Berlinale, the impact on the career of that film is quite remarkable. I am not sure one can surmise that only a certain kind of films are accepted at these high-profile venues, the calculus is more complex, there remains a relative degree of meritocracy, of appreciation for the artistry or masterfulness of a film. There are also other festivals, whose profile is not as glamorous, but that play a very important role in providing a platform for films and filmmakers that take bold risks or dare to experiment. Their impact is crucial, not only in terms of visibility, but also in legitimizing and ‘safeguarding’ a realm for that kind of cinema.

I know the notion of a “festival” film has a acquired a salient currency nowadays, it refers to films that fit the expectations of art-house film programmers (i.e. festival programmers) and critics that emerge at a particular time from a particular place. It is important to unpack these expectations accurately, not to develop a theory from anecdotes, however, these expectations are not at all different from those one detects amongst world sales agencies based in the West with an interest in the Middle East, nor are they different from those entrusted with acquisition on behalf of television stations. There are countless examples to endorse that theory, as there are countless others to discount it. However, I would like to answer your last question from another perspective, what wields the most detectable and essential influence on the content and form of a film are funders, investors and producers. The funders including grant-making institutions that are involved in film. And I would also like to note that funders, investors and producers from the Middle East impart a far more nefarious influence on the narrative and formal structure of a film than their European or American counterparts. Hence the power of the films included in the selection of ‘Enchanting Mutineers’, these are the works of filmmakers that have stood their ground, in many cases against the odds of forces in their home-countries.

The power of ‘independent film’ and the possible freedom it gives to its filmmakers seems to be loosing weight around Europe and the United States, whereas for the “rest of the world” it seems to become an ever more important tool? What do you think about the use of independent film as a means for political struggle, especially in this region?

That is a genuinely sad reality of independent films in Europe and the US today. In one of the options for titling this Middle Eastern series I toyed with, proposed to use the words “faith-healers” instead of “enchanting mutineers”, to acknowledge the extent to which these Middle Eastern filmmakers have restored faith in the power of cinema. They, as well as the censors and guardians of the despotic regimes of their countries, know the reach and extent of that power. It is not only a matter of bringing into visibility that which a regime needs to maintain invisible, iterating a narrative, or several, that is silenced, it’s far beyond that. Cinema interpellates the imaginary in its own peculiar manner, and the reasons despotic regimes have been so comfortably seated in power is partly because of people’s failure to imagine. I don’t mean to say we need transformative ideologies, nor that we should wait for a messiah to save us from the wretchedness of our time, I am referring to what fear has done to our capacity to imagine, and the failure of the antidotes or prognoses for relief we have thus far experienced. These independent filmmakers don’t propose solutions for conflicts, they represent in very different ways, a being in the world that is at once more complicated and humane, tolerant, just and intelligent. They re-write history, filling gaps that prevailing ideology or official discourse has edited out. 

The section is compiled of both documentary and fiction films. However, documentary seems to be the main form of expression for filmmakers from this region? Why do you think this might be the case?

The production of documentary films is notably more prolific in some of the countries that make up the region that others. For instance, in Palestine, Lebanon and Algeria, it is far more dynamic and daring, whereas in Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt, non-fiction is marginal compared to fiction. In Iran, the situation is more complicated. The reasons are many, and as you can surmise, each country has its own story or set of conditions. Consequently, it would be difficult to generalize. Documentary and non-fiction cinema is militant in more explicit ways, some governments, or regimes, have set constraints and punitive measures against ‘critical’ or potentially dissident filmmakers because they fear it more than fiction cinema. Moreover, the dissemination of digital technology has enabled documentary filmmaking remarkably, and in countries where resources for making films are practically non-existent, documentary film production has simply been a more accessible medium. On the other hand, in countries with relative margins for dissent or critique and where political conflicts or stakes are dramatic or sharp, documentary and non-fiction cinema have been a more interesting medium than fiction. These are some of the observations they don’t make for a thorough explanation, but they give some clues.

Are there certain films that you would like to highlight in the program, any recommendations, or remarks about specific films?

It was difficult enough to make that small selection from the long list of titles that was considered! I cannot single out one or two films, the entire selection is so diverse, I am extremely happy we were able to put it together. I hope that the festival’s audiences will be appreciate these films and that the program will mark some sort of a milestone for more programs in the future. Independent cinema in the Middle East has become one of the most daring, creative and raucous of the artistic fields. Cinema is first and foremost art, these filmmakers are so passionate about the kind of cinema they make, their talent and commitment are so compelling, in the end they become the most eloquent voices in defense of justice, freedom and dignity. When one reads headlines in any newspaper in the region, any given day, one has all the reasons to despair, but watching these films, in spite of sad characters and stories, one finds all the reasons to hope. And that’s my sound-byte.