Où vivre insiste, Where life holds

For my previous film,  Pourquoi la mer rit-elle ? (2019), I travelled through Tunisia and Algeria following the traces of a family memory and of the Italian anarchist collective Cantacronache, who had recorded, in 1961, an album of songs from the Algerian Revolution. 

During the shoot, I too collected women’s songs, they often told me they preferred singing their memories of the war. Sometimes they also sang about the sister struggle of Palestine. It was only later that I realised how deeply the stories of Palestine had accompanied my journey. In Tunisia, people told me about the arrival in the port of Bizerte of the Atlantis, the ship that carried Arafat and his men after they were forced to leave Beirut in early September 1982. It was also there that I first heard about Monica Maurer’s films, shot in Lebanon alongside the Palestinians. The thread of militant solidarity that ran through my own film seemed to continue into Palestine.

I thus began a correspondence with Monica Maurer. The COVID-19 pandemic delayed our meeting, so we exchanged footage remotely, including rushes from her films and from Tall el Zaatar by Jean Chamoun and Mustafa Abu Ali, which she had restored. We met in Rome in the autumn of 2021. Together we undertook the digitisation of nearly two thousand photographs documenting the Palestinian struggle in Lebanon, which she had kept in her home, and I was able to watch more than one hundred hours of archival footage.

In a notebook, I catalogued and described every reel in order to immerse myself in these images marked by History and to identify the archival material that would eventually become part of my film.

I have known Cahide Ozel for more than ten years. She is a very dear friend. Cahide lives in Rome and is a political refugee from Turkish Kurdistan. For a long time, I have wanted to film the intensity of her face and body, the hidden intimacy of her journey. One day, at Monica’s home, I came across a cardboard box filled with documents, photographs, books and Super 8 reels from Turkish Kurdistan that Monica had thought were lost. I asked Cahide to help me watch the Super 8 films. We discovered that they had been shot the year she was born, around her native village. As we turned the reels on the viewer, the possibility of a visual memory opened up before her.

Monica and Cahide then met over dinner at my home, and I began weaving connections between Palestine, Monica’s films, and Cahide’s exile.

I filmed in both digital and Super 8 in order to make visible the unresolved tension between past and present in Monica’s and Cahide’s lives, as well as in the struggles they embody.

I chose to shoot the digital images in black and white, using static compositions and the light of late winter afternoons, to create an intimate space for time and stories. The Super 8 sequences combine black-and-white Orwo film stock with colour Kodak film. Shot handheld, they often capture the vitality of bodies and gestures. The shifts between film and digital, black and white and colour, form the film’s singular trajectory, moving between my images and the archival footage.

I filmed over nearly 3 years, every time I travelled to Rome. I wanted to film Monica and Cahide in the realm of everyday life, where political discourse sometimes gives way to urgency and fragility. Their deeply marked bodies and faces revealed themselves through ordinary gestures that became rituals over the course of our meetings: Monica working at her computer; Cahide at home, at work, or during her countless trips. Anchoring the film in everyday life was essential to me. I wanted to make the struggle visible in ways that went beyond discourse, showing how it becomes the very fabric of life, with all its nuances and complexities. Cahide revealed herself in fragments, moving freely between reality and staged situations. She liked surrounding herself with Monica’s images. Her gaze often seemed to answer those of the people captured in the archival footage. Monica, is a slower body, often absorbed elsewhere. I filmed her many times in the same spot. Yet she travels, from the archives to the everyday, from yesterday to today, driven by the same impulse. A present moment, sustained by the vividness of her memory.

I wanted the film to convey this intimacy of struggle when it has left an indelible mark upon a body and a life.

My presence in certain shots emerged naturally.

Monica and I developed a working ritual. During the day we digitized her archives, and in the late afternoons we filmed. Those working sessions, side by side, the two of us together, are part of our relationship.

As I mentioned, Cahide is a close friend. I chose to film alone with lightweight equipment so that I could remain  named, complicit and present in our friendship.

I wanted to intertwine collective history with the everyday lives of Monica and Cahide, and vice versa.

I worked on the attraction between the images I had filmed and the archival rushes until they seemed to resonate with one another. I built correspondences through the materiality of the images, the details of the stories, the exchanged glances, and seemingly insignificant gestures, allowing fragments of a collective memory to emerge little by little.

I first edited the film in separate blocks or islands, then, together with Corentin Doucet and Narimane Mari, we searched for the film’s overall circulation. It was a complex editing process, but I could not have imagined it any other way in order to allow the intimate depths of these women’s lives to become visible and audible - whose echo is us.