> Interviews

Tales of the Purple House
Abbas Fahdel (Director)

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Cinema is life, mis-en-scene, even with documentaries

(Abbas meticulously arranges the placement of the bottle of water)

Abbas Fahdel (AF): It’s for the framing.

Fujiwara Toshi (FT): The perfect framing is always important . . .  Which brings already to an important point to discuss your film, as we can clearly see it’s very meticulously mise-en-scene, we even see scenes with decoupages. You call it a documentary but isn’t it almost staged like a fiction?

AF: Ah, it already started. Where do you want me to look? You, or at the camera?

FT: If you like to do Ozu, look at the camera.

AF: Well . . .  I’d rather not, it’s easier for me to look at you.

FT: As you like, so we have done a little game of mise-en-scene of cinema now, which we also see in the film already from the earlier scenes, like the conversation between the Syrian refugee boy and your heroine Nour, covered with two distinctly framed angles. That makes it so clear you staged it. Of course that was on purpose?

AF: Because we are filming life, and a filmed life is necessary mis-en-scene, with multiples of choices involved, like framing, the focal length of the lens, the length of each shot and of the entire sequence. If you don’t make choices, like you sit in front of a cafe and just look at people passing by, that won’t make a film. You have to make choices; which among the passing people you chose to be your subject, then how you would film that person, a close up or a wide shot, the length of the shot, that’s cinema. Cinema is life mis-en-scene (literally: put into a scene), and that doesn’t change with documentaries.

FT: We often say that in documentaries we don’t create anything, we film life as it is.

AF: That’s a lie. To say that a documentary film is reality is not at all reality. You stage what you film, you choose where to put the camera, in editing you make the choice of leaving a sentence or not, and depending on that choice the meaning of the scene differs. It’s in those choices that meanings are defined in a film.

FT: Then what was your choice of starting the film with a series of immense spectacular shots depicting the landscape of Southern Lebanon, as we hear a text that resembles biblical texts, in fact to the beginning of Genesis but without God. Can you develop on that?

AF: Each film I have made is connected to where I actually lived when I made it: a film about the place and who lives there. Homeland (Iraq Year Zero) (2015, YIDFF 2015) was about Baghdad and my family living there, and by showing the family we gradually discover the entire country. My family, the neighborhood, Baghdad, then finally Iraq. The same principle applies to Tales of the Purple House, we start with a house, then the village, and we reach Beirut. So the place is very important for me in general, but with this film the landscape was of particular importance, as with such scenery, filmmakers like you and me we cannot refuse to inscribe our cinematic writing within such landscape, to make sure you are part of that universe, in this case the land, the sky, the clouds, the trees. You are part of it and inscribe yourself within, making yourself one of all these elements. And by telling the story of those close to yourself you are actually telling the story of the land. 

FT: So as it was in Homeland (Iraq Year Zero) the family is . . .

AF: . . . the nuclear core.

FT: Yes, the nuclear center of a land and its culture.

AF: Exactly. And I feel it’s the best way to discover a town, a people, a country. It needs an intimate core, otherwise we will end up in reportage. You would end up a foreign journalist visiting a country with or without a war going on, we just collect random images, we put a voice over explanation, and you will end up without catching anything of the reality of that country. To film the reality you have to be living there. In that sense, naturally, what’s preferable is you film your native country, rather than just a visitor like a tourist. It’s easier to film a film that you already know very well beforehand.

FT: But with this film already the beginning is stunning in that sense, since you are native of Iraq which is more of a desert country, while Lebanon is a fertile land and at the very beginning you show and you tell about the richness of the place. 

AF: Well, for us Iraquis, or Arabs in general but perhaps especially for Iraquis, Lebanon is a country we like very much as it reminds us of heaven, firstly because of the songs by Fairuz that we used a lot in this film, but also because we live in deserts . . .  The Quran’s description of Paradise is modeled after the Lebanese landscape: the mountains, the trees, the rivers, the fruits . . .  All that I show in the film! And that must be because the Quran was written by desert people, and for desert people what does a paradise represent? What do they imagine? Rich water, the rivers, trees with fruits, and in Lebanon those things really exist.

FT: Same as the Torah, or Ancient Testament in Christianity, in Exodus Moses guides his people from Egypt to . . . “Land of Milk and Honey.”

AF: Exactly. 

Sectarian politics in Lebanon, imposed by western colonialism, and the original tolerance of Arab-Muslim culture

FT: So is this film religious in that sense?

AF: No! Or, the question is rather how we can define religion. For me it’s faith in the sense of feeling the cosmos. I don’t have a particular faith, naturally I grew up in Arab-Muslim culture which I like a lot, but I am not practicing, while I respect the need of others to believe in it. Nevertheless I feel that the way religions are in the world today doesn’t serve . . . God. Most religions reduce God into mere human scale, even very small, mean, stingy and miniscule: God is often described as someone obsessed with vengeance, who checks on what you did or didn’t do, while what I demonstrated in this film is that we humans are miniscule while the universe is infinite, enormous, and that universe of ours may only be only part of a far enormous entity, that’s my religious vision . . .  Maybe not religious but spiritual.

FT: Also, because religions are very crucial elements in Lebanese politics, as the entire political system is based on various religious sects, including who is going to hold governmental offices.

AF: Yes but it’s not really religion, that sectarian system was imposed on Lebanon by the French colonial powers, when Lebanon was under French Mandate. As it was in any other Arab societies, such differences didn’t exist before, even in Palestine prior to the founding of the state of Israel: Muslims, Jews and Christians co-existed and mixed with each other, in rather friendly terms. But the French played favoritism with the Maronites, hence Christians, so that the society would be divided according to sects: They gave the presidency to the Maronites. That’s even inscribed in the constitution but since then the Lebanese society has developed, and the majority in numbers are now Shia Muslims, so the Shia movements like Hezbollah emerged as defenders of the Shias as marginalized and discriminated against, as the constitution and the political system do not accord the rights that they normally deserve. 

But for each Lebanese, religious faith means the relationship each individual holds with God. However, that relationship is bastardized by politics.

FT: Which is so misunderstood by the rest of the world, mainly in the West. When we go to Arab countries, the people we meet must of course be often Muslim, but they never fit into the stereotypes that the media shows us.

AF: Absolutely, but you know Islam stayed about as long as nine centuries in Southern Europe, in Spain or in Sicily, but what remains of them?

FT: Well . . . Granada?

AF: Yes, the architecture. But otherwise no Muslims remained as they either returned to Asia and Africa, they were expelled and had to flee, or forced to convert to Christianity. But to the contrary the Christians and Jews have always lived within the Arab-Muslim world until today. Well, with the Jews now we have problems, but before the creation of Israel there were Jews everywhere, in Iraq, Egypt, in Tunisia and Morocco . . .  Jews had to leave but Christians are always there. They never were expelled nor persecuted, which means that the Arab-Muslim culture is indeed very tolerant to others. But this, of course, nobody in the West knows about. 

FT: They don’t want to know about it, as it’s easier to paint the Arabs as barbaric and savage, while European Christianity may be the world’s most intolerable exclusive religion. But in your film we see a tower of a church, then we realize next to it there’s a mosque. First it’s a long take so only an attentive audience may recognize, but then you get closer and closer as the story also develops, and we finally realize we were talking about that. 

AF: That’s very important. I showed my first film Dawn of the World (2008) in Switzerland, and at that time there was a referendum asking all the citizens whether a construction of a mosque should be allowed, and the majority voted against. There were already four mosques in Switzerland, still they needed to decide whether a fifth should be allowed, and the population said no. So at my press conference I spoke of that, “What are you afraid of? When you go to Istanbul, you enjoy visiting the mosques, same thing in Cairo, you take photos. A mosque is also a cultural center, there’s nothing scary about it,” So the reactions are quite unreasonable about everything that touches Islam.

FT: In contrast, the heroine of the film, Nour, is very friendly to the Syrian refugee boy. Is there a difference of accent in Arabic?

AF: Yes yes, but Lebanon and Syria are very close there isn’t much difference compared to for instance Iraqi dialect and Lebanese, Lebanese accent and Egyptian, Syrian and Lebanese accents are very close. 

FT: I see, also we don’t hear your voice in this film, but if you had spoken, the Arab speaking audience would notice you’re an Iraqi?

AF: That depends, as I don’t exactly speak Iraqi dialect any more, I speak with a mixture of all. I left Iraq very young, in France I meet Arabs of all the countries, in Lebanon I speak a mixture of Lebanese and Iraqi, so people may tell I am not Lebanese but don’t necessarily recognize I am Iraqi. Arabs from Morocco to Iraq, they will understand the film, they won’t need subtitles. The Arabs from Algeria are different, their accent is very peculiar no other Arab can understand, but from Morocco to Iraq we all speak Arabic fairly standard.

FT: While in the West and even in Japan we tend to ignore, in the Middle East everybody speaks Arabic, in that sense it’s a very cosmopolitan language.

AF: Absolutely. 

FT: And the film seems to take place in a little village, but people from all over the Arab World seem to go through it. It’s not a closed space in that sense. Was that one of the reasons you shot there?

AF: Well, that’s also part of what we spoke before about the nuclear core. In Homeland (Iraq Year Zero) we went up to the entire Iraq but not further, while with Purple House we went up to . . . the cosmos! We are not restrained in just one country, the ambition was to enlarge it up to the universe. 

FT: Was it the landscape of Lebanon that allowed you to do that?

AF: Absolutely.

Why Lebanon? Because I divorced myself from France and Western politics

FT: So why Lebanon? You used to live in France.

AF: It was rather a coincidence. I used to live in France for many years but I don’t get inspired to make films there. Like a film in Paris and a boy meets a girl . . .  The French do that very well and I like those films, Eric Rohmer was my professor and I love his films.

FT: Really?

AF: Yes of course, but I couldn’t see myself making those films. Nevertheless I got an idea of making a film that takes place in the countryside, and I put an announcement on my Facebook page that I was looking for a village, rather dated but still inhabited. You know in Europe many countryside villages are now abandoned. There are still city people moving to the country villages but it doesn’t have the spirituality of a real village. People sent me photos and videos but they didn’t correspond to the idea I had. And it was at that point that a Lebanese friend of mine, Nour Ballouk, at that point we were not yet married, called me and said “Why don’t you come to where I live?”

FT: Really. So at first you wanted to make a film about a French village, but you couldn’t find . . .

AF: Yes! A French one, and the place Nour proposed I already knew, It’s beautiful. Before that I made a film called Yara (2018) in northern Lebanon, in a valley inaccessible by car, it took one hour by foot or on a donkey because 150 years ago any constructions were forbidden in that area. So the place was very well preserved and that was important for me. And while shooting that film, I fell in love with Lebanon so decided to do the editing there, as I edit my own films. So I stayed in Lebanon to edit the film and do the post production. I continued to stay there since, and got married.

FT: So now you prefer to live in Lebanon.

AF: Yes yes, also because I don’t like living in Paris anymore, I still have to be there from time to time for my work but I am very disappointed with Paris and what France has become. I still like the language and I have written a novel in French, my first one to be published soon, but politically I am divorced from it, with French politics, or politics in the West in general. Look at what’s happening, when Arabs are massacred they are not interested, while when an Arab or Muslims do something, you know what happens.

FT: Yes, very sadly that hypocritical double standards have become the norm . . .

AF: You see. And that Islamophobia I cannot stand any more. I prefer to live where I can feel relaxed, even when . . .  You know the most severe economic crisis today? It’s in Lebanon now. The inflation is catastrophic, you had 1000 dollars worth of bank savings and in one day it becomes 5 dollars worth. But despite all of that, you see in the film people enjoy life, they are full of humor, they are very friendly . . .

FT: which is in a way surprising about it, you start and end it  with the spectacular landscape, we are stunned, and we later discover that there people are camping, just enjoying the great nature. They still don’t stop profiting from what life has to offer.

AF: Fortunately. And because they had to live through so many catastrophic events over the years they understand what is really important, for instance beauty, like the beauty of the landscape.When evening arrives, at 5PM they are out of their job and take their shisha, they take food, and go out to the great nature.

FT: So they often do that!

AF: Yes, very often, all over Lebanon but especially in the south, as the sunset is magnificent. I invented nothing. The sky is beautiful, so are the mountains, there are no special effects. So they go up the mountains, they watch the landscape, instead of listening to the radio or watching television, which are filled with bad news, war, economical crisis, shortage of gasoline, etc. It’s better to enjoy the eternal beauty of being alive.

Economical crisis, corruptions, and wars, but life continues nevertheless for the Lebanese 

FT: That’s also what the film makes us feel, as if this village is some sort of an Utopia, but nevertheless there are always interventions of harsh realities, like the news we hear on television, with politics et all. You never describe the political context directly, but can you explain a little for the Japanese audience, as the only thing we really learned about Lebanon is Carlos Ghosn. So we vaguely understand it must be very corrupted, but . . .

AF: It may be the most corrupt country in the world, I mean, its political elite class. They are often criminal gangsters or war criminals from the Civil War, the war lords or business men who made fortunes out of dishonest means . . .

FT: Like Mr. Ghosn!

AF: He is very much a good example of the political economical elite class of Lebanon! That’s why he is so well connected, has many friends who consider him their hero. A national hero can be a musician or a writer, but for the ruling class of Lebanon he is the national hero. So you have phenomenons like Ghosn and on the other hand you have the vast majority of the population who are very impoverished, and sadly many people immigrate abroad. Lebanon has always been a nation of immigration for the last century and a half, with so many crises like wars, famine, so many people had to leave their country. They indeed prospered more abroad than in their country. In Brazil there are ten million Lebanese, while the population of Lebanon is six million. So that makes nearly two times the number of Lebanese in Brazil than in Lebanon. And now with the present crisis more young people are ready to leave. They haven’t left yet because either they don’t have the money or they need passports, and it’s terrible because they are the future of the country. 

FT: The third part of the film begins with street demonstrations, but the film was shot two or three years ago, so what happened to these popular political movements?

AF: We finished filming in March 2022, so it’s a year and a half ago. But what happened is that the economical crisis pushed the people to fatigue, so there are less and less people protesting. The situation got worse, the economy, the corruption. But people are tired, also because these protests didn’t bring anything to them. Also because they don’t have alternative choices like opposition political parties. The people can protest, but are incapable of taking power.

FT: So there are no parties that can represent them.

AF: Exactly. In the last election emerged two little parties that we may call “independent,” they could send three MPs to the parliament, but three, that’s really next to nothing. And on top of that these three representatives who were part of the protests we see in the film have now entered the corruption. So, there’s no hope. And in a way the secret theme of the film is that: what we have left with are beauty and art, if art can save us from reality or not? That’s what I tried to do with all the beauties I could film, the beauty of nature et all, to ask if art and beauty can still help us to continue to believe in life. 

FT: You are after all a stranger in Lebanon, but can we call it a “patriotic” film?

AF: In the good sense? Yes. Actually I feel Lebanese. Which is ironic as most real Lebanese now want to leave! For example, to live in Southern Lebanon one must be crazy. We are a few dozen kilometers from the Israeli border, and the Israelis are not really humanitarian . . .

FT: They are very humanitarian among themselves!

AF: Exactly! With their bombardments on others who they see not as their people . . .  So you must be crazy wanting to continue to live so close to them. Even the native Lebanese are forced to leave, or more precisely you have to choose, either to leave or continue to live with the bombardments, or you go to the outer world where the Lebaneses are seen with negative stereotypes. But the reality is like what you see in the film, and Lebanon continues to strive thanks to the people who continue their everyday lives in spite of the many difficulties. With all the problems they have to face, I wonder how other people than the Lebanese can continue to bear and survive. They have learned to live without a government, not depending on governmental rules.

FT: Because one can say there are no effective governing bodies.

AF: No no there are not! The president stopped functioning in office for many months, same with the parliament, as the political parties cannot agree on who is going to succeed the presidency and when to elect a new parliament. So at present there are neither a parliament nor a president. So the same people remain for the time being as interim ministers waiting for those who would replace them to be nominated. But then they need a president to nominate the new prime minister who would nominate his ministers, so . . .  That means there are no governmental services, the water is not running, no electricity provided by the municipality. So in our house we have three choices, to wait all day for the two or three hours that we get electricity, or subscribe for private resources which cost 200 or 300 dollars per month when the minimum monthly wages in Lebanon is about 100 dollars.

FT: Which is hyper expensive

AF: And even the private sectors cannot sustainably furnish electricity, so we found a solution: the solar panels. But that’s only because we have enough income. But most families they don’t, same with water which the government can provide only a few hours per week. So you have to find your ways to maintain water. All of that because there is no functioning government. Garbage is often left uncollected for two weeks. It’s not very sanitary and you have to live with all that.

FT: Those details you chose not to describe directly in the film.

AF: I avoided, because these can distort the subject of the film. It’s not a reportage about what happens right now. 

FT: The film still shows many things about the COVID, but yet we feel the film is rather timeless, it’s not anchored to a certain particular time period.

AF: Exactly, and that is intentional. That’s also why I included the cosmos et al., to enlarge the scope of the film. 

My cinephilia and the quotations from the films important to my life

FT: That must be also part of the choices to quote classical films that are not of the contemporary time.

AF: Yes yes, of course. There are two explanations for that. As a cinephile I prefer to watch for my 100th time a film by Ozu or Tarkovsky or Bergman rather than . . . the latest Christopher Nolan. Well I have seen some as in Lebanon you have access to all films in pirated editions! But with recent films, I watch five or ten minutes then I stop. It’s not interesting for me. For me I need that a film represents truthfully some people, a place, a country, things that I need to live, but films that always tell the same story with the same kind of actions, edited too much with too many angles . . .  I also need to see, to watch the faces, the landscapes, otherwise I lose interest. We often make jokes about Japanese tourists who spend one week in Europe, one day in Paris, the next day in London, their bus stops in front of the Eiffel Tower and they just take photos, the bus stops at a park and again they just take photos, then they go to Rome and do the same thing. So they see nothing. It’s only at home that they open the photos they took and say “I was in Paris, I was in Rome” but no. American films, or even the films from the West in general nowadays, resemble that. They don’t really let you know and understand, but just images. 

FT: Interesting, since the quotations from films are not close ups, but nevertheless images of human faces: you start with Monica Vitti in Red Desert (1964), who by the way strangely resembles Nour, your wife.

AF: Well . . .  I admit that came into my mind, yes. But the films are really the films I watched, that I always loved, that we watched together, and while watching them I thought “Oh, this can be in my film.” Then we become conscious of what we watched, like I framed her in the same way, asked her to have the same eye as Monica Vitti did, hence these quotations became part of the mise-en-scene.They are not just pictures we frame in windows, but there are dialogues between what I do and these films I love. 

FT: One of the most striking citations is from Ozu’s Equinox Flower (1958), the scene with Tanaka Kinuyo remembering the times during the war, and she says the bond of the family was strengthened during the war.

AF: That’s the most terrible experience I lived in Iraq when I filmed in Homeland, there’s a scene in which the little sister in a room with her brother and sisters says “We will all sleep in this same room.” Her brother asks why, and she replies “When there is a bomb and we will die, we will all die together, or we will survive together.” And it’s so similar it really struck me in the film by Ozu, as I rewatched it after filming Homeland, so our spirits had met then, I felt.

FT: It’s also important that every film of Ozu after the war includes similar remembrances about the war, but most critics rarely take notice. 

AF: It expresses a paradox, that the family of four were tightly together during the war.

FT: While in post war Japanese society the ties of the family became less and less important, as Ozu described. Or even genuine human relationships became scarce, becoming more and more superficial.

AF: And that’s the story of Equinox Flower, especially the ending. And that makes the film very powerful, pertinent. He didn’t like the melodrama so he didn’t sensationalize it, but he described a world that was disappearing.

FT: And perhaps there’s a similarity with Purple House.

AF: I hope not! I’m happy now in Lebanon. I don’t want to feel like we're living in a world which will disappear!

FT: So your daughter was born after you finished the shooting.

AF: Nour was pregnant in the last scenes of the film, when we went up the mountains toward the end of the film, she was pregnant.

In cinema we make too much fuss about technology

FT: You shot this film yourself without a crew.

AF: Yes, myself, with no crew. That’s how I work since Homeland. So I did Homeland, Yara, Bitter Bread and this one, four films that got invited to major festivals, by myself with a camera like that (pointing at the camera shooting the interview). As for the sound, my wife when she was not in the scene held the microphone, and the Syrian boy also helped us a lot. In cinema we make too much fuss about technology. When I teach filmmaking I tell the students to forget all about that, with truck loads of equipment and an army of crew. Before making Homeland I made a fiction film Dawn of the World with a 35mm camera, four assistants for me alone, a huge technical crew, and I suffered a lot from that experience. It’s a simple film with two main characters, and in front of the girl in love we had fifty people with the camera. Is that necessary? No. It’s heavy, it costs a lot of money, it’s time-consuming, and I couldn’t work like that any more. And for the images you need to know about and be trained, but with the sound there was the boom microphone, we had pin microphones on the characters, you have to be very attentive as you zoom that the boom microphone gets into the frame, of course with that you may get very clean sound, but it’s not an absolute necessity. It’s too much, we make life too complicated making films like that.

FT: And nowadays small cameras like this can give images of the quality we see in the opening of Purple House.

AF: Yes yes. Of course someone can come in here with a bigger camera and that shot may be less beautiful than what our cameraman here is filming. It’s your eye and also your training. That’s the difference between a news report and cinema, a reporter and a filmmaker. For me it’s like being a painter, you need to know how to look, the way you frame changes, also your attention to the light, how you frame according to the light and when you change your framing . . . .

FT: Especially with this film, it must be essential to know how to tell when the light was good.

AF: Yes yes. That’s the pleasure of filming, and another reason why I don’t imagine myself to be shooting with somebody else at the camera. And that’s also what I teach, that they need to learn to do everything. It’s not like a writer or a musician, in cinema . . . of course it’s different when you shoot Star Wars it won’t be like shooting with two people in a small bedroom. But it’s possible to make a film just by yourself, and since it’s possible we should always try. And many students before meeting me, I do many master classes, they never realized that. They were always taught that they need to write a screenplay first, find a producer, then wait, find a DP, an editor, and I tell them you don’t have to wait, if you really want to do, and you have a subject, just go ahead! Godard said the same. Once he was invited to a film school, he just sent a letter and wrote to the students, if someone proposes you to make a film on a fly, or on washing machines, do it! Don’t wait until they propose you to do The Brothers of Karamazov or War and Peace. Don’t wait for big subjects. Everything that surrounds you deserves to be made into a film, don’t wait for a big camera and a crew of fifty people. Don’t aim for an Oscar. That, I find, is excellent advice.

FT: Nevertheless it became possible thanks to these new cameras.

AF: Of course. So we should take advantage. When I started the easiest available cameras were the 16mm, but I could have never made my films with 16mm as they are still expensive, still quite big, and heavy.

FT: And the maximum you can shoot is ten minutes.

AF: Absolutely. And also people take notice of these big cameras. While with those small digital ones nobody pays attention except when you ask them to look at the camera. 

FT: There was even that boy who gave you an ice cream!

AF: Yes yes, the camera didn’t bother him, and I couldn’t say thank you because I didn’t want my voice on the soundtrack. And I was holding the camera with just one hand as I had to receive the ice cream. 

FT: That scene was very typical that we the audience become conscious of the camera as a framing device, but wasn’t that idea prevalent in this film? 

AF: Cinema is a question of what is in the frame and what is outside of the frame. Here I am not filming but if I decide so then I have to determine how I will frame you in what composition. 

FT: You also have the empty frames for paintings in which you put some flowers, et all.

AF: Yes, it was to underline that the cinema cannot exist without frames.

FT: And even with the quotations of films, you always put the TV set in front of a window, which is also a framing device. 

AF: Absolutely. To have frames not only within but besides the frame. Especially with the Bergman film, in the film we see someone opening a window. I wanted to make sure just in case someone still didn’t get it at that point in the film! 

FT: That was a bit of overkill for me: I could tell exactly what would happen!

AF: But you know, not everybody remembers Bergman by heart.

The era of the great masters is gone. What will be the future of cinema?

FT: So, these are the films that you know very well, almost by heart.

AF: Yes. I really don’t like the word “classic” but these are really classics, auteur films. Because nowadays I am a bit weary of cinema. I like Wang Bing, Nuri Bilge Ceylan . . . but American films for instance, the contemporary film directors don't interest me.

FT: Even with young French filmmakers . . .

AF: Now it’s the new French “Films of Quality.” The Nouvelle Vague, the youngsters of Cahiers du Cinema revolted against the French “Films of Quality,” Caiyatte, Delanoy, etc., and the young French filmmakers today I call them “New French Films of Quality.” We know what they are all about, a story of a couple, personal, private life . . .  There were once Pialat, Melville, Bresson, and they don’t have the equivalent of these filmmakers. The problem today is that there are no masters. Same with American films, there are no great masters like Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, John Ford . . .  Today you have Nolan . . .

FT: Maybe Scorsese but he’s already 81. 

AF: Coppola too, he doesn’t make films anymore.

FT: Actually he seems to be making one!

AF: Ah, did he finish? I didn’t know he could start it, I heard he had many problems with that big project.

FT: Megalopolis.

AF: Well, we’ll see. But the period of the great masters ended. Now I am interested in Asian films, like Korean ones. Also films from the former Eastern Europe, like Romania.You know Radu Jude? He won a prize in Locarno. He’s a very modernist filmmaker in a good sense, also inheriting a stunning cinematic culture, his modernism makes him one of the very rare filmmakers worth watching today. And it was a great pleasure that for the ten greatest films of all time poll for Sight and Sound, on the 8th place he put Homeland, while in the list of the ten best films of last year he had Tales of the Purple House. And we don’t know each other, he must have seen it pirated somewhere! 

FT: Well it fell into the eyes of someone worthy. So . . . we are running out of time, so . . . are you going to stay in Lebanon and are you going to make films in Lebanon?

AF: This year I had a project to make a film in Iraq, a little like Homeland, maybe it will become Homeland (Iraq Year 20) or something like that. I was preparing it, then my daughter was born, so I couldn’t leave. For the first time in my life I prioritized my family obligation and decided to stay home, so instead I wrote a novel in French, which will be published next year. 

FT: And your film projects?

AF: For the time being I have none, the next one will be the one to be shot in Iraq.

FT: But then, you didn’t start Purple House with a project in mind. You started to film your daily life and it became a film.

AF: That’s right.

FT: So isn’t it possible another film will be born like that?

AF: That’s possible. And now a war has started, so I am sure I am going to film. My wife told me she heard  bombings all day yesterday. But according to her . . .  Also in the film you see sometimes there are very strong winds, and because of the wind today they can not fly low enough to drop bombs! You can never win against grand nature. Nature told them to stop! 

FT: Must be God!

AF: Well, everybody can interpret as he likes!

FT: But that sounds almost biblical.

AF: You know, we live in a biblical land.

Compiled by Fujiwara Toshi

Photography: Kusunose Kaori / Video: Kato Takanobu / 2023-10-10