7 years after showcasing “You Make a Better Window Than You Do a Door” at Visions du Réel’s Short Film competitors hair, Lebanese-born Farah Kassem is back in Nyon, this time in the primary worldwide competitors with her doc feature-length launching “We Are Inside.” Range was approved access to the trailer.
The movie was produced by the helmer’s routine partner Cynthia Choucair of Lebanon’s Road2Films, in co-production with Qatar’s Al Jazeera Documentary Channel and Denmark’s Good Company Pictures (“Photographer of War,” “Beautiful Something Left Behind”).
The seven-year space because Kassem began dealing with “We Are Inside” was a transformative duration for her and her native nation as she highlighted in a declaration. “I saw, to name a few things a sense of wear and tear and damage, that will be really hard to come back from. We’ve experienced a transformation, the 4th of August Beirut surge, the on-going massacres in Gaza and the attacks on Lebanon,” stated the filmmaker, now developed in Brussels.
On an individual level, Kassem lost her precious daddy Mustapha, a popular poet. His strong character and joie de vivre live on through the filmmaker’s 2012 brief “My Father Looked Like Abdel Nasser” (in which Mustapha has a hard time with the loss of his spouse) and now “We Are Inside.”
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In it, Kassem returns to Tripoli, Lebanon, after a 15 year-absence, to stick with her dad whose health is quick decreasing. There, as she attempts to reconnect with him, she rapidly comprehends that poetry is the crucial to his body and soul. “I comprehended that poetry was his method to handle my mom’s loss, to sorrow his nation, and to survive,” she informs RangeIn the intimacy of her daddy’s little flat, the dad and child exchange mild arguments, tender and amusing minutes, as Kassem quickly moves, backward and forward, on both side of the video camera.
Kassem is presented to the remote world of her dad’s men-only poetry club, which she certainly chooses to sign up with … “although I dislike timeless Arab poetry,” she admits.
“There you had these guys– all well over 70, struggling with diabetes, yet consuming lots of sugar, babbling through verses and rhymes, about what charm is left in this world, while the nation was collapsing. I discovered this remarkable yet ridiculous, and began to believe– this can be a movie,” she states.
“Making the movie was a best method to invest more time with my daddy, to do something together, and through the procedure, keep him alive, as long as possible.”
“Ultimately,” Kassem continues, “the movie has to do with time; how to take a look at it, deconstruct it. My daddy was getting more delicate, I was altering, and the nation remained in continuous modification. The difficulty was for me to process this modification and turn it into a movie.”
As in her earlier work “Cleaning Schaerbeek,” which scooped finest brief doc at the 2019 Brussels Indie Film Festival,