with Sara Fattahi
Words & photos by
Mudar Al-Khufash
Film Stills & snippets
Courtesy of the artist
Even though she thinks, that the time may have come to call herself a filmmaker, she prefers not to be defined by it yet. The Damascus -born-Vienna based director, Sarah Fattahi showed her latest film Chaos at the 10th edition of the Arab Film Festival Berlin. A documentary film, narrating the lives of three Syrian women in the aftermath of the Syrian war. One woman lives in Damascus, who lost her son to the war. The second is a bi-polar collage artist who lives in Sweden, and the third woman is Fattahi herself.
“Sad sad sad sad, heavy heavy heavy heavy,” yelled one man in the movie theatre, while the film credits were rolling and just before Fattahi was about to start her Q&A session. Yes, war stories are heavy, yet still, in between all the sadness and heaviness, the strength of these women underpinned a sense of lightness in the whole story narrative, bearing us to continue watching, and smile at times at their projections and to what they tell. The film also properly captures moments of order manifesting itself in the collages the artist makes and the perfectly kept tidy room of the dead son. The contradictions between the apparent chaotic trauma the women experience and the order they produce in their daily routines and rituals, institutes a comprehensive calmness to the scenes, continually inducing sighs of relief.
The actual war in the film is invisible, but its tangibility is consistent throughout the film. It reveals itself in a form of inner wars, embodied by these women and the stories they tell of specific events that haunt them and deeply cutting scares that seem impossible to heal. Not visually literal or linear in the narrative nor the storytelling. Fattahi’s artistic cinematography and the dramaturgy of the scenes can be described as an emotional video essay. It’s a stitched footage of the women in their surroundings, at times shot indirectly, catching their reflections on glass, other shots are out-of-focus, or tight close-ups. The footage is intently layered over voiceover of the women talking, together with mixed audio of carefully chosen room surrounding sounds. Like birds, blowing wind, underground trains, and an MRI machine at work (which sounded like a bird singing at first before it blasted a loud mechanical clang), all in the efforts to create own worlds, capture the emotional state and evoke feelings. This processing approach takes the film into another territory, making it more than just a regular documentary film, but rather a visual elegy piece that can easily stand by itself.
There is a fourth character in the film, that adds another dimension, it pushes the film even further away from the documentary genre and takes a dive into the imaginary. She is a loose representation of the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann -who also suffered the consequence of war and died in a fire in Rome 1974 when she fell asleep while smoking a cigarette.
Chaos order, exile, and creativity are among the topics we discussed with Sarah Fattahi, after her first screening night in Berlin.
“I don’t mean chaos in a sort of a chaotic situation or environment, but I’m referring to Greek mythology. According to mythology, chaos is female, she is the mother of all creation, an empty space where everything started. it produced elements, like the earth, the underworld, love, and darkness. She basically created life. It’s about inner wars, unresolved and unsettled matters, this type of chaos. I’m talking about the interior of the human being, and not exterior chaos.”
“The woman who lost her son in Damascus is my mother’s best friend, and the second character in the film, the artist in Sweden, is my best friend. If it was a conscious decision to portray only women? yes and no. If you look in the media landscape, they present Syria from the male perspective. But through women, you can actually understand the ideology and the structure of a society. And by the way, I’m surrounded by women more than I’m surrounded by men. So that's a reason also, but I wasn’t really planning on it. If I was more surrounded by men, who knows, I would’ve maybe have made a film about men. I’m more interested in feelings, and not much in facts and numbers. In human beings and what they are feeling, and what traumas the war has produced.”
"ah basically I started working on this film at the end of 2014, that is where I finished the Damascus part and while I was finishing the post-production of my first film Coma. The second shoot that happened was in Sweden in 2017, and then the Vienna part, which was in 2018. So the production took place in three different countries, over three years, almost. The post-production I just finished working on last year August 2018."
“I was questioning my process as I was making this film, the process of film making. Cause it’s not easy to film the things you can’t see. You can’t film feelings. You can only sense but not film, So I was lets say, fascinated by the environment surrounding each of the characters in the film, I was trying to be more sensitive to the sound, to the light, and shadows, I was looking to create a world for each one of the protagonists in the film. Let me say it this way, I believe you should feel what you film, more than film what you feel. This is a concept I was questioning while working on the film. It’s not so easy to film with people who are traumatized, I had to think of the distance I should keep, and I couldn’t find this distance, because I was alone in the process.”
“Sound for me is a separate entity to images, sound can redefine a scene or a film, it’s a structural principle, not only an element that is there you just use. Goddard said once, I always have to think of this sentence, he said, you have to listen to the image, look at the sound and listen to the image. This is what I was trying to achieve in this film.
In Sweden, it was very obvious, the artist, had this wind blowing sound, all the time, blowing through her window. She was unaware of it, she didn’t realize she lives with this sound. I was fascinated by that. It was a gift from that space. Each time you see Sweden on the screen, you hear this wind sound. I tried to connect that place, with this sound.
Damascus, of course, is a very lively city, cars, and traffic, you can hear neighbors talking through the walls, also there, I was trying to create an environment for the character, where you feel she is completely isolated, although she is surrounded by so much life."
“I spend a few days with each character before I start filming. Just observing, looking for details, taking as many notes as I can, of their surroundings, how they behaved, how they sit, how they look, how they move, and how they spend their days. This comes down to 3 or 4 days with each character. I realized they are not aware of some of their daily routines, which looked like rituals. Like the woman in Damascus, she was repeating daily, preparing the room of her dead son, as if he was still coming, she waits for him every day, although she knows that he will never come back. Repeating these acts felt like praying to me.”
"I ended up knowing about Bachmann by chance 3 years ago while doing research on poets. When I moved to Vienna and looked through that research, I found that while I worked on 3 poets, Bachmann was one of them. Since I moved to her city -that she left after the second world war- she made the perfect bridge for me. she was a person who also suffered from war consequences and wrote about her traumas, The voice over of her talking which I used in the film, is from an interview she gave in Rome about Malina, her new novel, a year before she died. Her function in the film is as doppelgänger, you hear her talking about that in the film. She is my doppelgänger, and doppelgänger of every woman in the film. She basically was a bridge between Vienna and me, the other characters and I, between the story and I.”
"The exile in the film is about a state of mind. Each character in the film chose her own exile, the woman in Damascus lives in her city, but still lives in exile, she isolated herself, she feels like she is now an alien because she can’t fit in this new situation, loss of her son, and the sorrow it caused.
The woman in Sweden migrated there 6 years ago, she struggled with the language, with her life, with herself, and with her psychological situation. In a way or another, each has her own exile.
But for me I won't say I live in exile, I’m still questioning the environment. It would take more years from now, to redefine what I’m going through right now. But I wouldn’t call it an exile, but a time to rest between two battles. For sure exile makes you see things from a different angle. You will always feel like you are an alien, even if you make peace with the present you are now living, you still feel you are incomplete, and you can’t fit anymore with the past or present, you are in the middle of nowhere. This is how it feels to me. I think the feeling will stay with me forever, even if I go back to my country. So funny, in Syria they used to call me the Stranger cause I was different in the way I behaved and thought, sometimes you just don’t fit to where you were born. And In here they call me the Syrian. There I was not Syrian enough, and here I’m only the Syrian."
(with the artist in Sweden)
“While I was filming this scene, I remember I was sitting close to her, it’s maybe the first scene I shot with her, I was surprised that, in the middle of our conversation, she started talking about birds, and that this is the first and only things she noticed, when she first migrated to Sweden.
This has many contradictions within itself, the heaviness she has, and the lightness she is looking for. Birds you know, light beings, represents freedom. It also reflects on her state of mind, something has to do with being on earth and in the sky, both, heavy and light. The way she was repeating the word ( طيور Toyur is Birds in Arabic ) “Toyur, Toyur, Toyur” it’s as you are hearing a melody. She does this by the way throughout the film, she repeats words often, which I wanted to use a sound as the melody for the scenes."
(with the artist in Sweden)
“She received that song from a friend of hers, which was recorded by a fighter from the north of Syria. I don’t even know the name of the song, it’s unknown who sings it, the only words you hear in the song, are the names of people who died in the front line. The rhythm of the song is upbeat, a style from the north of Syria, you can also tell by the accent.”
(with the doppelgänger)
“I’m not one of those filmmakers who like to use a lot of metaphors, but here, it just happened. I knew the door has a problem when you try to open it. But I thought I just let the actress go ahead an open it, I left her to struggle, I wanted this to happen. I wanted to provoke the viewer who is sitting on a chair, to have the feeling to jump and help with opening the door. Once the door opens, the apartment is empty, It’s like the struggles we have in life, you just wanna seek refuge, to enter a place to hide, and rest. But once you enter you find yourself in the middle of emptiness.“
"I can’t call myself a filmmaker yet, even though maybe the time has come to do so. I like to work with images and sound, and I leave the people to call me whatever they feel like. I studied law, and I also graduated from an art school in Syria, and I have been working as a film animator for 14 - 16 years. In Syria we don’t have cinema schools, I had to train myself, and how to define images and sound. Studying Law helped me not to break the laws of filming in Syria (she laughs).”
with Sara Fattahi
Words & photos by
Mudar Al-Khufash
Film Stills & snippets
Courtesy of the artist
Even though she thinks, that the time may have come to call herself a filmmaker, she prefers not to be defined by it yet. The Damascus -born-Vienna based director, Sarah Fattahi showed her latest film Chaos at the 10th edition of the Arab Film Festival Berlin. A documentary film, narrating the lives of three Syrian women in the aftermath of the Syrian war. One woman lives in Damascus, who lost her son to the war. The second is a bi-polar collage artist who lives in Sweden, and the third woman is Fattahi herself.
“Sad sad sad sad, heavy heavy heavy heavy,” yelled one man in the movie theatre, while the film credits were rolling and just before Fattahi was about to start her Q&A session. Yes, war stories are heavy, yet still, in between all the sadness and heaviness, the strength of these women underpinned a sense of lightness in the whole story narrative, bearing us to continue watching, and smile at times at their projections and to what they tell. The film also properly captures moments of order manifesting itself in the collages the artist makes and the perfectly kept tidy room of the dead son. The contradictions between the apparent chaotic trauma the women experience and the order they produce in their daily routines and rituals, institutes a comprehensive calmness to the scenes, continually inducing sighs of relief.
The actual war in the film is invisible, but its tangibility is consistent throughout the film. It reveals itself in a form of inner wars, embodied by these women and the stories they tell of specific events that haunt them and deeply cutting scares that seem impossible to heal. Not visually literal or linear in the narrative nor the storytelling. Fattahi’s artistic cinematography and the dramaturgy of the scenes can be described as an emotional video essay. It’s a stitched footage of the women in their surroundings, at times shot indirectly, catching their reflections on glass, other shots are out-of-focus, or tight close-ups. The footage is intently layered over voiceover of the women talking, together with mixed audio of carefully chosen room surrounding sounds. Like birds, blowing wind, underground trains, and an MRI machine at work (which sounded like a bird singing at first before it blasted a loud mechanical clang), all in the efforts to create own worlds, capture the emotional state and evoke feelings. This processing approach takes the film into another territory, making it more than just a regular documentary film, but rather a visual elegy piece that can easily stand by itself.
There is a fourth character in the film, that adds another dimension, it pushes the film even further away from the documentary genre and takes a dive into the imaginary. She is a loose representation of the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann -who also suffered the consequence of war and died in a fire in Rome 1974 when she fell asleep while smoking a cigarette.
Chaos order, exile, and creativity are among the topics we discussed with Sarah Fattahi, after her first screening night in Berlin.
“I don’t mean chaos in a sort of a chaotic situation or environment, but I’m referring to Greek mythology. According to mythology, chaos is female, she is the mother of all creation, an empty space where everything started. it produced elements, like the earth, the underworld, love, and darkness. She basically created life. It’s about inner wars, unresolved and unsettled matters, this type of chaos. I’m talking about the interior of the human being, and not exterior chaos.”
“The woman who lost her son in Damascus is my mother’s best friend, and the second character in the film, the artist in Sweden, is my best friend. If it was a conscious decision to portray only women? yes and no. If you look in the media landscape, they present Syria from the male perspective. But through women, you can actually understand the ideology and the structure of a society. And by the way, I’m surrounded by women more than I’m surrounded by men. So that's a reason also, but I wasn’t really planning on it. If I was more surrounded by men, who knows, I would’ve maybe have made a film about men. I’m more interested in feelings, and not much in facts and numbers. In human beings and what they are feeling, and what traumas the war has produced.”
"ah basically I started working on this film at the end of 2014, that is where I finished the Damascus part and while I was finishing the post-production of my first film Coma. The second shoot that happened was in Sweden in 2017, and then the Vienna part, which was in 2018. So the production took place in three different countries, over three years, almost. The post-production I just finished working on last year August 2018."
“I was questioning my process as I was making this film, the process of film making. Cause it’s not easy to film the things you can’t see. You can’t film feelings. You can only sense but not film, So I was lets say, fascinated by the environment surrounding each of the characters in the film, I was trying to be more sensitive to the sound, to the light, and shadows, I was looking to create a world for each one of the protagonists in the film. Let me say it this way, I believe you should feel what you film, more than film what you feel. This is a concept I was questioning while working on the film. It’s not so easy to film with people who are traumatized, I had to think of the distance I should keep, and I couldn’t find this distance, because I was alone in the process.”
“Sound for me is a separate entity to images, sound can redefine a scene or a film, it’s a structural principle, not only an element that is there you just use. Goddard said once, I always have to think of this sentence, he said, you have to listen to the image, look at the sound and listen to the image. This is what I was trying to achieve in this film.
In Sweden, it was very obvious, the artist, had this wind blowing sound, all the time, blowing through her window. She was unaware of it, she didn’t realize she lives with this sound. I was fascinated by that. It was a gift from that space. Each time you see Sweden on the screen, you hear this wind sound. I tried to connect that place, with this sound.
Damascus, of course, is a very lively city, cars, and traffic, you can hear neighbors talking through the walls, also there, I was trying to create an environment for the character, where you feel she is completely isolated, although she is surrounded by so much life."
“I spend a few days with each character before I start filming. Just observing, looking for details, taking as many notes as I can, of their surroundings, how they behaved, how they sit, how they look, how they move, and how they spend their days. This comes down to 3 or 4 days with each character. I realized they are not aware of some of their daily routines, which looked like rituals. Like the woman in Damascus, she was repeating daily, preparing the room of her dead son, as if he was still coming, she waits for him every day, although she knows that he will never come back. Repeating these acts felt like praying to me.”
"I ended up knowing about Bachmann by chance 3 years ago while doing research on poets. When I moved to Vienna and looked through that research, I found that while I worked on 3 poets, Bachmann was one of them. Since I moved to her city -that she left after the second world war- she made the perfect bridge for me. she was a person who also suffered from war consequences and wrote about her traumas, The voice over of her talking which I used in the film, is from an interview she gave in Rome about Malina, her new novel, a year before she died. Her function in the film is as doppelgänger, you hear her talking about that in the film. She is my doppelgänger, and doppelgänger of every woman in the film. She basically was a bridge between Vienna and me, the other characters and I, between the story and I.”
"The exile in the film is about a state of mind. Each character in the film chose her own exile, the woman in Damascus lives in her city, but still lives in exile, she isolated herself, she feels like she is now an alien because she can’t fit in this new situation, loss of her son, and the sorrow it caused.
The woman in Sweden migrated there 6 years ago, she struggled with the language, with her life, with herself, and with her psychological situation. In a way or another, each has her own exile.
But for me I won't say I live in exile, I’m still questioning the environment. It would take more years from now, to redefine what I’m going through right now. But I wouldn’t call it an exile, but a time to rest between two battles. For sure exile makes you see things from a different angle. You will always feel like you are an alien, even if you make peace with the present you are now living, you still feel you are incomplete, and you can’t fit anymore with the past or present, you are in the middle of nowhere. This is how it feels to me. I think the feeling will stay with me forever, even if I go back to my country. So funny, in Syria they used to call me the Stranger cause I was different in the way I behaved and thought, sometimes you just don’t fit to where you were born. And In here they call me the Syrian. There I was not Syrian enough, and here I’m only the Syrian."
(with the artist in Sweden)
“While I was filming this scene, I remember I was sitting close to her, it’s maybe the first scene I shot with her, I was surprised that, in the middle of our conversation, she started talking about birds, and that this is the first and only things she noticed, when she first migrated to Sweden.
This has many contradictions within itself, the heaviness she has, and the lightness she is looking for. Birds you know, light beings, represents freedom. It also reflects on her state of mind, something has to do with being on earth and in the sky, both, heavy and light. The way she was repeating the word ( طيور Toyur is Birds in Arabic ) “Toyur, Toyur, Toyur” it’s as you are hearing a melody. She does this by the way throughout the film, she repeats words often, which I wanted to use a sound as the melody for the scenes."
(with the artist in Sweden)
“She received that song from a friend of hers, which was recorded by a fighter from the north of Syria. I don’t even know the name of the song, it’s unknown who sings it, the only words you hear in the song, are the names of people who died in the front line. The rhythm of the song is upbeat, a style from the north of Syria, you can also tell by the accent.”
(with the doppelgänger)
“I’m not one of those filmmakers who like to use a lot of metaphors, but here, it just happened. I knew the door has a problem when you try to open it. But I thought I just let the actress go ahead an open it, I left her to struggle, I wanted this to happen. I wanted to provoke the viewer who is sitting on a chair, to have the feeling to jump and help with opening the door. Once the door opens, the apartment is empty, It’s like the struggles we have in life, you just wanna seek refuge, to enter a place to hide, and rest. But once you enter you find yourself in the middle of emptiness.“
"I can’t call myself a filmmaker yet, even though maybe the time has come to do so. I like to work with images and sound, and I leave the people to call me whatever they feel like. I studied law, and I also graduated from an art school in Syria, and I have been working as a film animator for 14 - 16 years. In Syria we don’t have cinema schools, I had to train myself, and how to define images and sound. Studying Law helped me not to break the laws of filming in Syria (she laughs).”