A recent dip in female-led theatrical releases in the UK - back to 2018 levels of 26% reminds us that our work is far from over; that we cannot be complacent.
Below you can read about the research we conduct into gender representation in film and the wider industry, tracking the release landscape to present an accurate picture of investment in films by filmmakers of marginalised genders.
Here you can also find out about news and opportunities at Reclaim The Frame, along with curated film recommendations, filmmaker interviews, and creative responses.
Birds Eye View first met Annemarie Jacir back in 2013, when her second feature film, When I Saw You, opened our Celebrating Arab Women Film Festival. Last year, Jacir returned to the UK to present her third feature, Wajib, at the London Film Festival.
Wajib tells the story of Abu Shadi (Mohammad Bakri) and his son, Shadi (Saleh Bakri). Abu Shadi is a divorced father and a school teacher living in Nazareth, the largest Arab majority city in Israel. Shadi is his son; an architect living in Rome who returns to Nazareth to help his father in hand-delivering the wedding invitations for his sister’s wedding, as is the local Palestinian custom.
The film is released in UK cinemas this Friday, 14th September. BEV’s programme curator Jo Duncombe was delighted to have the opportunity to catch up with Annemarie to discuss what ‘wajib’ means to her, the remarkable process of working with actors who are father and son in real life, and her passion project – creating a community arts centre at her family home in Bethlehem…
AJ: There isn’t a good translation of the word in English so I kept it as ‘wajib’. I was drawn to the idea of ‘social duty’ for many different reasons. Mostly, I was interested in the unspoken rules behind how communities function, not just in the Arab world but everywhere. So, for example, if someone invites you for dinner, it’s your ‘wajib’, next time, to invite them. ‘Wajib’ is how everything functions within Palestinian society and for the most part it’s a positive thing – there’s something really honest about: it’s how communities and traditions are created. But ‘wajib’ can also feel stifling because sometimes, you are duty-bound to do something simply because you’re supposed to do it. There’s something empty about that. In that sense, the film is about both participating in, and pushing against community.
AJ: I am interested in real characters: real people. When you work in fiction, you’re working completely with poetic license – I like to have characters that are ambivalent. Shadi is angry and actually quite annoying! He’s tough on his father. But at the same time, you understand where he is coming from. I’m interested in that grey space. Shadi uses his mother’s absence as a pin to poke his father, but he’s also similar to his father, and deeply connected to him. That’s the very heart of Shadi’s battle. Of course, Abu Shadi is fighting a personal battle too. They each know they aren’t perfect, but are too proud to admit it.
AJ: In Palestinian society, the hand delivery of wedding invites is a masculine tradition, and what drew me to focus the story on this is the way men tend to avoid each other at home or in public spaces. It is something of a cliché, I know – that men do not always say what they need to say – but one that contains a lot of truth to my mind. The constraints of the car on the father and son really bring this reticence to light, so while there is a great deal of dialogue in the film, it as much about what is not said.
AJ: Yes, I say that Nazareth is like a third character in the film. Though it’s not particularly visible, it comes between Shadi and his father who have differing perspectives on the city. For Abu Shadi, Nazareth is a little paradise – despite the reality that, as Palestinians, they live in a ghetto and they are discriminated against. Abu Shadi is always trying to find ways to be upbeat about the city.
Shadi’s relationship with the city is much more complicated: he loves Nazareth and never wanted to leave. He was a politically conscious teenager, and for a young Palestinian living in Israel, that’s a dangerous thing to be. That’s why his father feared for him – so he sent him abroad, to protect him. Now Shadi has lived abroad, he prefers his life in Rome, and he is does not want to return to Nazareth. But he will always be a kid from the neighbourhood; it’s stitched into him.
AJ: Wajib is dialogue heavy, but in development, I was always thinking about where I could remove dialogue. It was a really nice process, working with Mohammed and Shaleh. Mostly what you see on the screen is what was scripted. But there are two scenes that I really worked on with the actors – the two ‘fight scenes’ in the film. These scenes had to be really raw, and really personal. We did a lot of improvisation around these scenes, after which I would go back and rewrite it, taking the things that I liked.
AJ: Yes – they are real father and son. A lot of people don’t know that! They’re both actors in their own right, though they had never worked together before. The decision to cast them together was really difficult because it’s so personal! When I wrote the script, I had Shaleh in mind; he’s my long-time collaborator. Shaleh’s father, Mohammed Bakri, is a legendary Palestinian actor.
I knew casting them together would be explosive in terms of the energy they would bring to the characters. Shaleh is deeply respectful of his father in real life – but Wajib is a film about a son who has lost respect for his father. I had to make sure that both men were really willing to be open and vulnerable throughout the process.
The fight scenes were the only scenes I shot with two cameras, one on each actor. I knew that each take would have a different energy, and I also knew they couldn’t do it many times. I think in the end we shot three takes. It was emotionally exhausting for both of them. It was very real, and I didn’t want to abuse them by making them go through it over and over again.
There was a remarkable energy between them that was not scripted or expected – you can really see the love between them. It came out instinctively.
AJ: I think it’s really important for me to do this. Palestine is building its film industry. There are not many Palestinian films being made – three features a year is a really great year! But, I think it’s changing. There’s a big difference between now and when I shot Salt Of The Sea. There are more and more crew available, and a lot of them have also become filmmakers, doing their own writing and directing.
AJ: I don’t like that title! I don’t like it because I think it’s misleading. It’s true that Salt Of The Sea was technically the first feature film from Palestine directed by a woman, but I’m definitely not the first female Palestinian director. There’s a lot of women before me that have been working in documentary and experimental films and that I really look up to and admire. I’m part of a Palestinian film community where there are a lot of female directors. It’s not something unusual. In the Arab World, there are a lot of women directors. Very often when you go to an Arab film festival, more than half of the films have been directed by a woman. Unlike some of the big Festivals in the West, as we know. Just look at the programme in Venice this year… one woman in competition. It’s exhausting! That’s not to say we don’t have our own issues with patriarchy in the Arab World… but in terms of cinema, I think we’re doing pretty good!
AJ: I have two projects on the go. The first is my next script, which I’m currently developing. I’m not going to say much about it, but there is a British connection…
AJ: I love it too! I have love for the UK.
AJ: The other project is a family dream that I’ve been working on for the last couple of years with my sister. We’ve been renovating my father’s 127 year-old house in Bethlehem, and we’re opening it up this year as an arts and cultural space. We’re set up for film screenings and exhibitions and there are green spaces that we’re giving to children from a refugee camp – they’ve decided to create a vegetable garden.
In Bethlehem there are not many community projects – most of Palestinian cultural activity is focussed in Ramallah. My father is the head of this project – it’s something he’s always dreamed to see, and now it’s happening.
AJ: We’ve started with some soft-programming and collaborations. There’s a film festival in Ramallah next month, and we’re going to be hosting some of the workshops and screenings there. We’ll have the official opening in Bethlehem in December.
It’s called the Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art & Research. There’s also a residency for a visiting researcher – my great-grandfather and grandfather were incredible archivists. They kept everything from pre-State Palestine, from when the British & Ottomans were there. It’s an incredible archive and we’re digitising it for researchers and academics to use.
Come visit!
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Wajib is Palestine’s entry for the 2018 Oscars.
See WAJIB + Q&A with the director Annemarie Jacir:
September 14 – Curzon Bloomsbury
September 15 – Cine Lumiere
In the coming-of-age film, critical acclaim and diversity have gone hand in hand recently, with films like Lady Bird, Moonlight and Call Me By Your Name expanding the repertoire of rites of passage screen stories. As champions of the female perspective in cinema, we at Birds’ Eye View have curated a season for Curzon on Demand that puts girls and young women in the centre of the frame. While the focus typically remains on the bittersweet transition from childhood to adulthood, many of these films inject the genre with a much welcomed richness and relevancy (and in the case of Vagabond, tragedy) by exploring familiar themes from less familiar perspectives.
This list spotlights a number of stand-out films about female rites of passage that have made coming-of-age such a fruitful genre for representations of the female experience – one example is the Georgian film ‘In Bloom’ which closed our last festival in 2014, and takes Jean-Luc Godard’s provocation ‘all you need for a movie is a girl and a gun’ and creates something vivid and original. All these films are directed by women and include a film (Vagabond) by Agnès Varda, the celebrated Renaissance woman and godmother of the French New Wave. Varda’s extraordinary, idiosyncratic and extensive body of work has long been an inspiration for a generation of female filmmakers committed to breaking down gender boundaries and to harnessing the power of the female gaze as cinema’s ‘seeing-feeling’ lens.
The writer and theorist Gayatri Chakvravorty Spivak had this to say about privilege. She said: “We must unlearn our privilege as loss.” The power and wealth we’ve been fortunate enough to have fall at our feet robs us of insight, insulates us from experience, makes us blind, cuts off part of our humanity, you might even say steals our souls. And I think you could extend that to say: our gains are a loss. Success is loss.
Generation Wealth gives us this insight very clearly. No-one in its audience would, presumably, trade places with its tragic subjects, even or especially the wealthiest and most successful ones.
The film’s subjects have very different lives, but they share a great uncertainty about who they are, how they fit in. They share an obsession with ‘making it’ – that is, a short cut to certainty, to clarity about your status. But of course, as they all find out, there are no short cuts. They’re all forced to see that their wealth, even if they managed to hang onto it, was a form of loss.
To this conundrum, the film offers a solution so clearly correct that it’s a truism: “hey, spend time with your family and those you love!” It underscores that truism with sentimental music, and it works: tears came to my eyes at the scenes of people, including the filmmaker herself, returning to their families, their roots. Yet the film is brave enough to undercut that message by showing the other truth: a filmmaker herself just as hypnotised by images of lucre and lurid attainment as her subjects. Even if she’s self-aware enough to render those images grotesque, sordid, she’s just as obsessed with enacting that repetition. And we, the viewers, are likewise entranced: we can’t take our eyes away. No more than her subjects can, when they stand hypnotised by the images unveiled in her exhibition at the end of the film – especially the images of themselves. Images that they stare at either on the precipice of some great insight, or else uncomprehendingly, like Narcissus about to drown in the waters of his own reflection. We even see one of her subjects photographing and recording her own self-image, though the filmmaker chooses not to judge this mise-en-abyme too harshly, since we too are part of it. To put this another way: if it were so easy to “do the right thing and spend time with your loved ones”, we’d no doubt all be doing it, instead of finding various ways not to, such as running away to make films (or escaping one’s home life by filming one’s home life – as the filmmaker does, as I have done in my own work).
One critique of Greenfield’s approach is that it collapses class. The privileged Harvard educated subjects who have every chance of making it, including the filmmaker herself, aren’t the same as the girls from Nowhere, Idaho, working Vegas, or the porn scene, or the bus driving job. But in collapsing that difference it also cuts across that divide, at a time when things are so divided it might be more useful to see what unites us. And what unites us all, perhaps, is this. We’re all ensnared in the same value system and we all have to unlearn our relationship to wealth as loss. We have to see how we’re all in some sense turned into addicts. Addicted to money or status or food or drink or drugs or sex or gambling or the internet or entertainment or gossip or images or success or whatever else it might be. But no matter what it is we’re addicted to, it would seem, what we’re all really addicted to is loss. Because we all secretly know by now, surely, that when we compulsively repeat the thing we fantasise could fill the void, that we never do sate or satisfy ourselves, we only manage to make the emptiness that compels us seem even wider, deeper, greater. And that raises the question: what are we losing with every acquisition, with every gain – and why are we so desperate to lose it?
Josh Appignanesi directed the features Song Of Songs, The Infidel, and recently the creative documentary The New Man. His upcoming film Female Human Animal, a romantic thriller docufiction set in the real-life art world, premiered at Sheffield Doc/Fest and is released in October 2018.
@JoshAppFilm www.joshappignanesi.com
