From Lebanon with Love
Botagoz Koilybayeva
Dear Hayk,
I am writing you this brief festival dispatch-field notes-correspondence in the hotel lobby while the Yerevan sun is starting to scorch the streets outside. As the Golden Apricot International Film Festival draws to a close, there are three films I keep returning to. I find it striking how many commonalities there are between Farah Kassem’s We Are Inside, Farahnaz Sharifi’s My Stolen Planet, and Mati Diop’s Berlinale winner Dahomey. All are nonfiction films that deal with the way memory and identity are often shattered by wars, colonialism, and state oppression. All are marked by the scars of the post-war milieu and grasping for a breath of fresh air—well, one breath at a time. All are made by what you might call Subaltern women—Lebanese, Iranian, French-Senegalese—who are reclaiming their agency, fighting back against cultural hegemony, patriarchy, and neocolonialism.
All turn to the notion of home, both literally and metaphorically. While Kassem is literally locked at home with her ageing father in their Tripoli flat, Shafiri leaves Iran, unsure whether she’ll ever be able to return. For Diop, Africa at large is home—a home that aches with pain and is still grappling with the double bind that is part and parcel of being a former colonised subject: the desire for self-actualisation is inextricably linked with the spectre and legacy of colonialism.
All three are engaged, to some extent, with archival practices—whether it is the home or news footage that makes up most of My Stolen Planet, the hours of Kassem's recordings of her father, or Diop's own attempt to document the historic restitution of some stolen royal treasures from the Kingdom of Dahomey that had been pilfered by French colonisers and displayed in a museum in Paris.
And all deal with loss: personal and collective. Shafiri’s film is infused with so many deaths that watching it can often feel truly gut-wrenching. Not only does she not spare us some disturbing footage of civilian murders and summary executions; she also shows herself at her most vulnerable, as when she receives the news of her mother’s death. For someone who has lost a parent, this scene could not be more heart-rending. In We Are Inside, Kassem also depicts the death of her father, the poet Mustapha Kassem, but here his passing heralds a new lease on life for the director. Death signals a moment of hope and liberation for the filmmaker, who seems to fully embrace her creative aspirations as a poet, if not of words, then of cinema. And while Diop does not capture the death of a parent, the mortality/rebirth arc still looms large over Dahomey. Towards the end, she films a passionate group of Beninese students discussing the importance of repatriation and restitution. Does France want to put on a good face by returning 26 stolen African relics? What about the rest, some 7000 other artefacts? Should the Beninese continue their struggle to disentangle themselves from the French gaze? One student states, eloquently and evocatively, that their job as a free Beninese nation is to bring back to life the sacred objects that had been desacralised through their display in French museums. As if to underscore the sanctity of the looted gods, Diop endows them with a deep and chilling voice, highlighting the urgency of returning the remaining relics home.
If I have a quibble with these films, that would be the quandary of what I would call “the intellectual Subaltern gaze”. Late into My Stolen Planet, Shafiri attends her first peaceful “Woman, Life, Freedom” demonstration outside Iran, in Berlin. In her home country, the notion of a non-violent protest is unfathomable, an anathema to Iran’s autocratic and theocratic regime— “their” planet. Throughout, Sharfiri oscillates between dualities like us versus them, remembering and forgetting, defiance and oppression, past and present. The word “my” signifies a break of the country’s actual, if turbulent, history, but what Shafiri calls “their” is in fact an everyday reality for millions of Iranians. On the contrary, Kassem, returning to Lebanon after 15 years in Europe, actively seeks to reconnect with her Arab heritage through her father’s poems. That said, I find Diop’s project in Dahomey much more invigorating because of the space for discussion her film carves out. This is not so much an imposition as an invitation to open an urgent discourse on contemporary Benin. The last segment of the film feels like the finale of a grand opera, the last stroke of a great painting; the students’ opinions and concerns, full of resilience and potency, are the film’s most riveting moment.
I hope you’ll manage to watch these films too, Hayk, if you haven’t yet, and I look forward to running into you at another festival somewhere in the world.
Warmly,
Botagoz
Botagoz Koilybayeva
Dear Hayk,
I am writing you this brief festival dispatch-field notes-correspondence in the hotel lobby while the Yerevan sun is starting to scorch the streets outside. As the Golden Apricot International Film Festival draws to a close, there are three films I keep returning to. I find it striking how many commonalities there are between Farah Kassem’s We Are Inside, Farahnaz Sharifi’s My Stolen Planet, and Mati Diop’s Berlinale winner Dahomey. All are nonfiction films that deal with the way memory and identity are often shattered by wars, colonialism, and state oppression. All are marked by the scars of the post-war milieu and grasping for a breath of fresh air—well, one breath at a time. All are made by what you might call Subaltern women—Lebanese, Iranian, French-Senegalese—who are reclaiming their agency, fighting back against cultural hegemony, patriarchy, and neocolonialism.
All turn to the notion of home, both literally and metaphorically. While Kassem is literally locked at home with her ageing father in their Tripoli flat, Shafiri leaves Iran, unsure whether she’ll ever be able to return. For Diop, Africa at large is home—a home that aches with pain and is still grappling with the double bind that is part and parcel of being a former colonised subject: the desire for self-actualisation is inextricably linked with the spectre and legacy of colonialism.
All three are engaged, to some extent, with archival practices—whether it is the home or news footage that makes up most of My Stolen Planet, the hours of Kassem's recordings of her father, or Diop's own attempt to document the historic restitution of some stolen royal treasures from the Kingdom of Dahomey that had been pilfered by French colonisers and displayed in a museum in Paris.
And all deal with loss: personal and collective. Shafiri’s film is infused with so many deaths that watching it can often feel truly gut-wrenching. Not only does she not spare us some disturbing footage of civilian murders and summary executions; she also shows herself at her most vulnerable, as when she receives the news of her mother’s death. For someone who has lost a parent, this scene could not be more heart-rending. In We Are Inside, Kassem also depicts the death of her father, the poet Mustapha Kassem, but here his passing heralds a new lease on life for the director. Death signals a moment of hope and liberation for the filmmaker, who seems to fully embrace her creative aspirations as a poet, if not of words, then of cinema. And while Diop does not capture the death of a parent, the mortality/rebirth arc still looms large over Dahomey. Towards the end, she films a passionate group of Beninese students discussing the importance of repatriation and restitution. Does France want to put on a good face by returning 26 stolen African relics? What about the rest, some 7000 other artefacts? Should the Beninese continue their struggle to disentangle themselves from the French gaze? One student states, eloquently and evocatively, that their job as a free Beninese nation is to bring back to life the sacred objects that had been desacralised through their display in French museums. As if to underscore the sanctity of the looted gods, Diop endows them with a deep and chilling voice, highlighting the urgency of returning the remaining relics home.
If I have a quibble with these films, that would be the quandary of what I would call “the intellectual Subaltern gaze”. Late into My Stolen Planet, Shafiri attends her first peaceful “Woman, Life, Freedom” demonstration outside Iran, in Berlin. In her home country, the notion of a non-violent protest is unfathomable, an anathema to Iran’s autocratic and theocratic regime— “their” planet. Throughout, Sharfiri oscillates between dualities like us versus them, remembering and forgetting, defiance and oppression, past and present. The word “my” signifies a break of the country’s actual, if turbulent, history, but what Shafiri calls “their” is in fact an everyday reality for millions of Iranians. On the contrary, Kassem, returning to Lebanon after 15 years in Europe, actively seeks to reconnect with her Arab heritage through her father’s poems. That said, I find Diop’s project in Dahomey much more invigorating because of the space for discussion her film carves out. This is not so much an imposition as an invitation to open an urgent discourse on contemporary Benin. The last segment of the film feels like the finale of a grand opera, the last stroke of a great painting; the students’ opinions and concerns, full of resilience and potency, are the film’s most riveting moment.
I hope you’ll manage to watch these films too, Hayk, if you haven’t yet, and I look forward to running into you at another festival somewhere in the world.
Warmly,
Botagoz