Conference of the Birds follows the intrigues surrounding a football club and its various stakeholders following the sudden death of its coach. Why did you choose to depict the world of professional football?
When following team sports on that scale, one comes across so-called transfer news—news that keep track of people, players, coaches, and officials being traded. Basically, a club can be compared to a cosmos which lives off the coming and going of people—individuals being bought, sold, injured, replaced, and being bought again. And all these people constantly find themselves in a high-pressure situation where they come together in new constellations and have to function as a group. It is this very frame which interested me early on and already offered a lot to explore. Alongside subtle references to sports myths like Zidane’s headbutt, Super League leaks or Saudi League—the film asks some naive questions and follows their path. What if there is a Champions League final and all the players don’t appear? Another aspect is the distance we often feel to this surreal world. In a way, working within fiction allowed me to approach it more personally—in the dialogues, motifs and relationships. Maybe that was a way to bring it a little closer to us. And with the very limited resources we had, I’d like to think that engaging with this world in our own way was, in itself, a small political gesture.
The title is taken from the Sufi poem written by Farid al-Din Attar, which tells the story of a group of pilgrim birds in search of their king. Is your film a very free adaptation of this text? How did it inspire you to write the film and your characters?
I knew the poem before, but the title came only after finishing the film. In the story, the birds search for their king Simorgh, and after passing seven tales, realize they themselves are the Simorgh. That resonated with the film: after the coach’s death, everyone left behind tries to fill the gap—they look for replacements, but then end up facing themselves. Actually, this also reflects on how we made the film—not from a fixed idea or plot, but rather backwards, by responding to what came up during the process. For instance, the coach’s death only came up after we lost the actor we had cast. Looking back at the footage we had shot so far, that absence made sense—it was already there. It gave a necessity to follow this second row of club officials navigating through turmoil.
The narrative stakes are sketched out according to a fragmented logic and distributed around a gallery of characters, who correspond to the key actors on a football team. They are presented here in a very fragile state, refusing to accept their assigned roles. How did you develop your characters in relation to these narrative threads? How did you choose the actors to play them?
There is a certain banality in what we’ve learned to know as a coach, a football player, a paramedic, a club president. Whether we like football or not, we all have very concrete associations with these characters. They are like silhouettes we project onto—we associate certain narratives with them. And that is a point where I was curious to naively follow these traces, their movements, places, encounters, and then to slowly drift away into unexpected routes. For me, that is the moment where they become visible. At what point do we start to see a paramedic as an individual, when we follow him strolling around without his ambulance? One starts to assume things one does not know and follows these assumptions in a very serious manner, so that they build their own reality.
Having these very concrete ideas of what a coach says, how a player appears and what codes there are, it was more about being precise about a surface that gives us an impression of a so called role or character. And an essential part of that was the cast. There was a very wide range of how the people found their way to the set. Very few of them are trained actors, and for most of them it was the first time in front of a camera. A lot had to be found out together on set—how their presence in the frame works, what they feel comfortable doing or saying. Then it was more the editing which gives us an impression of their narrative threads than them fulfilling a task.
Their minimalist dialogues give the film a very melancholy and enigmatic tone. What inspired this very singular tone? What did it imply in terms of staging?
What evolved during writing the dialogues was a certain rhythm in speaking, but I had to find out along the way more about it. When we read the whole script aloud—we had the impression that it is the same two people talking to each other throughout the whole film. It felt like two are talking to each other through different bodies, in different places. Then there is, of course, the aspect of directing on set, where I end up working out a certain rhythm of speaking with the cast which can result in a specific tone.
This logic of fragmentation is also to be found in the very structure of the film, whose temporality remains suspended throughout. What was the logic behind the editing?
To us, there was a certain grammar of people coming and going, appearing and disappearing, sitting and standing, falling and running. It all built a feeling that the film moves more in circles than in lines. So people reappeared in different places and places reappeared in different states. And this back and forth created a certain disorientation in time or a feeling that everything is in the air. It was a lot about trusting that the film moves and reveals in its own way and giving the spectator just enough framework to follow it.
Conference of the Birds plays on repetition, notably through the repetition of text, by the same or another character, echoing the question of interpreting which is the focus of several sequences. What interests you in this motif of repetition from a cinematographic point of view?
When I’m writing a script, I often find myself reading and watching things that seem unrelated to what I’m working on. But this kind of “chewing” on something else often surfaces themes that end up shaping the film. One book that was especially important during the writing of this script was Nevermore by Cécile Wajsbrot. It follows a translator in residence in Dresden as she works on Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The book is structured with fragments of Woolf’s original text in English alongside multiple attempts by the narrator to translate them—each version slightly different. Inbetween there are the translator’s own thoughts, drifting in and out of the text. That made me wonder: when we see a translator continuously speaking for others, at what point is she speaking for herself? This question runs through much of my work—the tension between what feels like one’s own voice and where it begins to blur or dissolve. Growing up between two cultures and across three languages, I’ve always been drawn to this in-between space, trying to find a shape for it. And repetitions have come to be a big part of it, as they are a natural rhythm of trying to understand. You repeat and try to understand. And along the way something else comes up. And I guess I find it interesting that it brings a certain notion of something not going forward but rather levitating—or sinking.
Regarding the framing, you favour close-ups and medium shots. The cinematography is also very precise and elaborate, in terms of lighting and colour grading, and its choreographic dimension—as much in the camera movements as in those of the actors—contrasts with the collapse, the dissolution of relationships, and the feeling of falling that the film depicts. Could you comment on these aesthetic choices?
The formal decisions come with the setting that we chose, which delves into the backrooms of a football club and plays rather along the margins of the actual matches. So, the centre is not present—the football pitch does not appear and the absence of the dead head coach is everywhere. This goes along with the question of what is in the frame and what is off the frame. Through the tight framing and off-screen sounds, the world around the characters contrasts their solitude.
Religion seems to gradually intrude into the lives of the characters after the death of the coach, as can be seen in the prayer room or in the astonishing scene where the club owner—played by musician Hicham El Madkouri—sings for his team. Could you tell us more about the presence of this element in the film?
Although I grew up in a Muslim household, I would not have expected to make a film where religion is this present. It was more an interest in its choreographies, its sounds, its faces, and its sorrow. There is a scene of the interim coach and the translator finding themselves in a Muslim prayer room. What interested me was the setting itself—the specific silence and the sound of people praying. I was curious about where this atmosphere might drift into something like a romantic encounter: a man and a woman praying next to each other, their hands touching, whispers of despair exchanged alongside whispers of prayer. What if, in this silence, her coat is so loud it’s almost funny? Looking for moments like this also opens up, for me, certain ideas people might have about Muslims. Cinema is a way to show different aspects of that—making it not just more complex, but also more sensual, haptic. When growing up, it was always a question to me why grief and sorrow are so dominant in Muslim culture. In the film I try to explore this aspect of it and how it gives the characters their fragility.
Interview by Louise Martin Papasian
