By Jakub Mejer (Poland)
After watching one of several Dracula adaptations, you might read the original Bram Stoker novel and find yourself surprised. It’s told in letters! The epistolary narrative structure of the book is hardly preserved in any of the movies. Is this form unsuitable for film? Literature has used it many times producing several masterpieces (let’s just name Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werter), while it’s hard to name a single popular film using this technique.
Life May Be, a film co-directed by Irish film critic Mark Cousins and Iranian filmmaker in exile Mania Akbari, is one of the attempts to use the epistolary form in that we’ve seen at Dokufest. What started as an essay that Cousins wrote for the re-release of one of the Akbari’s movies, ended as an exchange of several letters that are read on screen by the two of them and accompanied by visual explanations of the topics they are discussing. The footage we can see is often abstract or even hard to watch. A long shot of the Scottish wilderness where nothing happens (homage to Abbas Kiarostami), a slideshow of private photos, Cousins slowly getting naked on a hotel sofa, or Akbari having a bath. At the same time they read their letters – the voices here play the most important role in the movie. They are discussing Akbari’s exile and her work, but slowly the film starts to focus on nudity and the significance of the body, both in capitalist and Muslim culture. Mark Cousins seems to like the idea of using letters in his movies. His second film shown at Dokufest, May Be Dragons, has a small segment where he is also reading an open letter to deceased Albanian communist leader Enver Hoxha.
The epistolary form is also used in another film shown at Dokufest – Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait. Unlike Life May Be, this time it appears only in the second half of it. Syrian director Ossama Mohammed is living in exile in Paris. His sole source of information from his homeland is Wiam Simav Bedirxan, a teacher living in Homs and shooting footage that is used to depict the horrors of everyday life in Syria. Their correspondence allows her to have faith and him to be in touch with events happening back home. She shows Ossama how she is struggling to make a living, looking for housing and food, and helping abandoned children. Her footage is violent and disturbing, often showing the dead or injured.
Both films have several similarities besides their form. Each is co-directed by a male and female director. In each case we have one person living in exile and a second one in his or her home country, while the themes discussed in exchanged letters concern the Middle East. There are, of course, also serious differences. In Mohammed and Bedirxan’s work the male character is in exile, while in Cousins and Akbari’s it is the female. In the Syrian movie it’s the exiled person that is trying to comfort the one that stayed in the homeland, while in its counterpart the opposite is true. Mania Akbari feels insecure in London, while Ossama Mohammed is relieved and safe in Paris. Mark Cousins has a normal, happy life in the UK; Wiam Simav Bedirxan is fighting for survival. The Syrian filmmakers met for a first time at the film’s world premiere, while Cousins and Akbari are friends, they’re even shown together on film.
Mania Akbari stated after the screening of Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait that she liked the way the narrative is driven between Bedirxan and Mohammed. That’s not surprising: she used the same one for her own work. Besides shared epistolary technique, both films are very different in their form. Life May Be might be called an artistic experiment, a discussion between two friends about art and society, full of homage to great artists. Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait is showing us a naturalistic, gritty, low-quality image of the destroyed country, full of gore and disturbing footage. While in Life May Be we don’t really know how these letters are exchanged (besides the first one that was written as an essay for a DVD re-release), in Silvered Water we know they are chatting online – as the soundtrack is full of ambient sounds of computer messaging.
Dokufest is offering us two films that are experimenting with a form that is popular in literature and almost non-existing in cinema. And we should treat them as experiments. Both are exhausting to watch, but due to different reasons. Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait is full of extremely violent and disturbing images. Life May Be is focused on audio, comprised of slow takes lacking any action or plot. But if you’re interested in experiments in cinematic form, that’s the closest thing to The Sorrows of Young Werther you can get here.
