Interview with Baya Medhaffar
1. You started your film career as an actress, notably in the film À peine j’ouvre les yeux (As soon as I open my eyes)(2015) by your compatriot Leyla Bouzid. How did you end up behind the camera and what are the origins of Festina Lente يا عم الشيفور?
The transition was quite natural, my interest in filmmaking started before my experience as an actress, and although the latter was rewarding, I didn’t feel I was in the right place. This type of exposure does not come without a certain violence and I never managed to assimilate the sudden estrangement from my body, the idea that I was trapped in it and yet it was escaping me. I needed to feel its porosity, and my desire to make my voice heard through images made me step behind the camera. In Festina Lente يا عم الشيفور it’s as if I were taking stock of my time as a student in Paris. I try to retrace my journey and vanishing lines, I am searching for myself while I search through the images and sounds I pass through and that pass through me..
2. The film is composed of a wide variety of images and sounds whose origin is not specified. Can you tell us more about all the extracts used? What ideas or intuitions informed the editing?
The film was indeed created during the editing process. My intention was to place several heterogeneous regimes of sounds and images on an equal footing, to extract them from their source, to de-contextualise them and transform them into raw material. It combined the vernacular images I’ve filmed over the years with the archive images that I’ve collected. One of the film’s guiding principles was to explore a journey, a crossing. I arrived at the editing stage with a feeling, a rhythm that I attempted to reconstruct, trying not to bypass each difficulty encountered (difficulties linked to not having written the film beforehand), but rather to explore their potential. Making the film was more like composing music than writing a script. That’s where the title comes from, the Arabic part is taken from a song by Fatma Boussaha - a pioneer of traditional Tunisian music - where she says ” “Drive slowly Mr Driver”. The Latin part comes from a saying that means “make haste slowly”, the combination of the two creates a kind of rhythmic oxymoron. The place of the title in the film became obvious during the editing process. For me, it marks a time when walking went hand-in-hand with a form of hesitation and inaugurates another time when it became more decisive.
3. The film is about constantly getting lost, finding the right path. In this wandering, the only landmarks are memories so old that they seem to come from another world, even another time, that of childhood, as you say. What made you adopt the stance of childhood?
Childhood is an anchor point from which I explore the world around me, with all the seriousness of a child at play. It’s also a refuge that allows me to turn the film into a playground, a cinematic sandbox. It was also a way for me to examine my personal history in the light of History, while preserving a form of freedom in the editing, the liberty to try things that I wouldn’t necessarily have dared to if I didn’t have this “cover”. Actually, in many respects, it is a perspective that is quite close to my own. Deep down I’ve never managed to shed my childhood, I’ve always felt that I was in an in-between place, that of transitions that haven’t occurred. The feature film project I am currently working on also explores this theme.
Interview by Marco Cipollini.
