Barbara Wurm (BW): Nurith Aviv, it is a great honour, to welcome you in the Forum with your new film PRÉNOMS (Given Names). We saw each other in Frankfurt at Remake Festival: Frankfurter Frauen Filmtage, with two films by you which are quite connected to PRÉNOMS. You have written: ‘A given name is a gift, a choice, a message that can be questioned, interpreted, reinvented all throughout life.’ What are the origins of this film, this idea, and above all the form which the film ultimately found?
Nurith Aviv (NA): In fact, each film contains the next film, I just don’t know it beforehand. But the last film, LETTRE ERRANTE (WANDERING LETTER, 2024), was about a letter in the alphabet. Not didactically, but I went to people and asked them about their stories with the letter ‘R’. ‘R’ has so many possibilities and people recont their problems and stories with ‘R’. The film begins with me narrating how sounds have colours, and I give an example of childhood friends: ‘Gabi or Gila was green, Dina, David or Dani were blue’, and so on. The film ends with a colour and the story of the first alphabet, which some researchers say was invented in a turquoise mine on the Sinai Peninsula. I have now returned to these two themes – friendship and the alphabet – in my next film. I thought I would make a film with my friends and assigned each letter of the alphabet to one of them. Then I saw that I only have 22 friends with different letters. ‘Okay, I’ll go visit the 22’, I told myself, because the Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters. But in fact I had chosen the Latin alphabet. At first I thought of an installation with these 22 friends. But then there was somehow a film. These 13 friends to whom I went, who said they would tell me about themselves based on their given names, I didn’t expect them to tell me these uncanny stories. I mean, not all of them are uncanny, but it was surprising that they all have these kinds of stories with their given names.
Christiane Büchner (CB): How did you do the interviews? We see you come in with flowers and that you’re warmly greeted. We understand these are people who like you. But how did you work with your friends?
NA: In fact, the idea with the flowers comes from the film LETTRE ERRANTE. There, the flowers stood for the colours because the names all had colours. In that film, they were wild flowers, and for PRÉNOMS, I said to myself, ‘Okay, now I’ll take cultivated flowers.’ I often bring flowers when visiting my friends, and that’s how I had the idea to film the flowers. In one hand, I had the small camera and in the other, the flowers. And then I say their name and they smile and invite me in. It’s an exchange: I give them a bouquet of flowers and they give me back a bouquet of words.
It’s an exchange: I give them a bouquet of flowers and they give me back a bouquet of words.
This was also, I have to say, in the terrible time of absolute horror which happened in Gaza and is not ending. And the idea of meeting a friend each weekend... It was important for me to be with friends. Not that it made me less depressed – but I was with friends and we talked. We talked about our everyday lives, or even about the time before when parents chose their child’s name. How did they receive these names? And that’s how they recount the beginning, where they are from and where they sometimes move. That’s the question: Where are we from? This does not mean that I think that we know something about our origins. I don’t think you’ll ever figure it out. A given name is different from a last name, which is the same for the entire family. The given name belongs to this one person. Sometimes it is a gift and sometimes they don’t like the name and change it. And sometimes they learn to like it. It is the relationship to the given name, to the parents, to those who gave them the name. And what most surprised me were these connections between people who didn’t know each other.
CB: Everyone in the film tells their stories unbelievably well and I imagined that if you asked me about my name, it would be a short story. How did you lead your friends into so many memories?
NA: I have to say that most of them have a name which comes from somewhere else. That is, either they were born somewhere else or their parents were born somewhere else. And the name comes out of this migration story. I think that people who come from one place to another, from one language to another, from a name to another would also tell these kinds of stories. They were often stories related to this movement and translation. These themes return again and again in my films. Of course, I talked to them a lot beforehand, and sometimes I knew the story already. And they know my films too. They know my interests. I don’t know how many films I’ve made about language. 15 or 18, I’m not really sure. For this reason, it wasn’t an interview like this one here. The people worked on it beforehand. But they weren’t allowed to learn it by heart. Absolutely not. But they knew what they would talk about.
BW: Do you edit too?
NA: Mostly. In the film, you always see the flowers I brought along, as if they belong there. And I need them for the rhythm, because sometimes the people talk so fast and say everything at once. But we were always aiming for one single shot. It doesn’t have to be the first one, in fact it was never the first shot. That’s why it is a bit like with actors. Since from one shot to the next, things become clearer for the person who has spoken. Sometimes I say something between the shots, sometimes not. It depends. They often notice too what I liked or disliked. But it isn’t the question that I like, but what is really at the centre of the whole story. In fact, the people are performing. They think. And what I absolutely love is that I feel like I’m filming their thinking. That’s what interests me.
What I absolutely love is that I feel like I’m filming their thinking. That’s what interests me.
BW: Is this reinforced by the friendship and the relationship between the director and protagonist? Is it always complementary and good, or does that sometimes get in the way?
NA: No, it doesn’t get in the way. Friendship is at the centre of this film. Friends are in all of my films. But here it becomes a theme. That is, for me it is also a film about friendship.
CB: This impression becomes stronger over the course of the film. At one point, when you see the flowers, you wonder, ‘How will they fit the person who is about to open the door?’ Because you already know this and it creates a nice expectation.
NA: I went to buy the flowers every evening before the shoot. And they were flowers that I liked in that season. Sometimes it fit really well without me preparing it beforehand. The two flowers at Edouard’s which became symbolic, because they suddenly enter into dialogue with what he says. I’d already filmed Tewfik 25 years ago in the film CIRCUMCISION (2000) and in that one he says, ‘Yes, okay, I didn’t have my son circumcised’, which Muslims do. ‘I didn’t do it because Brigitte did not want to.' They told the story about the circumcision or not circumcision, and he said, ‘But I gave my sons Arabic names.’ And then at the end of CIRCUMCISION, he tells me the story of his sons’ names. After wrapping PRÉNOMS, Tewfik told me something that would become the most important thing in the whole film. He told the story of how his name Tewfik was pronounced differently at school than the way his mother said it: Tsoufi’e. He was very ashamed when his mother called him that way, because pronouncing his name with an open syllable at the end is feminine. And Tewfik with a ‘k’ at the end is masculine. He was unbelievably ashamed of his mother calling him that, as if he were homosexual. I told him, ‘I would murder you! How could you not have told me that?’ But okay, you need to deal with what is missing and that’s why I’ve told you now. It means if something is not in the film, then the most important thing is of course not the most important thing. Except in the moment it is missing, you think what is missing is the most important thing.
BW: The most astonishing thing about your film is how this concept of the ‘name’ opens up a dialogue with oneself and one’s own biography, and how it expands this play with one’s own identity without slipping into arbitrariness, but instead follows very precise lines that seem predetermined but are in fact self-chosen. Was it clear to you from the start that the given names would work in such a way that they would open up a universe of each person’s own culture, family, and friendships?
NA: I thought there was something important there, but not that it would become so important. For example, I knew Edouard’s story, but it took a lot of work with him until he told the story about how he got his name. It became a much stronger, poetic story with a rhythm which he found and which I did not edit. The rhythm comes from the people and they find it by really recounting what is most essential.
The rhythm comes from the people and they find it by really recounting what is most essential.
BW: You’ve made many films about language. LANGUE SACRÉE LANGUE PARLÉE (2008), ANNONCES (2013), SIGNING (2018), YIDDISH (2020), WORDS THAT REMAIN (2022). You’ve just published a book, ‘Filmer la Parole’ [Filming Speech]. Where does your fascination with language come from?
NA: I think I’m illiterate in four languages, none of which I can speak correctly. I can speak Hebrew, but that wasn’t my first language. My parents spoke German with me and when I went to kindergarten, Hebrew was at first not my mother tongue. I also say in one film, ‘I don’t know what my mother tongue is – is it the mother’s language or is it the language in which you count, as they say?’ And I count in Hebrew, I don’t count in German. But German is my first language, and it’s the language that is related to a certain emotion which is not the same in Hebrew and certainly not in English. And it is also different in French. And I’m speaking of emotions now which are so different. That was also nearly my first film – writers who do not write in their mother tongue. What happens between the two languages? When you speak multiple languages, you are permanently translating. I was a cinematographer and shot around 100 films for other people, and I always felt that I was the translator. I tried to find out with the directors what the best translation of the film idea into images was.
CB: You said the original idea was for an installation with interviews. Can you briefly describe how it would have looked?
NA: Yes, it may still happen. I had the idea of 22 interviews, which was too many for a linear montage. The idea is that I place 22 tablets on a table with the screen facing up. The first letter of the name is at the top and the screen is on a glass table under which is a mirror. That is, the films are reflected in this mirror and everyone who comes to the museum can take a tablet. Nobody will see the whole thing. It wasn’t conceived to be seen as a whole, but in parts. You take one, have a look, put it back on the table without there being fixed spots. I want the tablets to lie on the table like cards, tossed down.
CB: Were you nervous while editing about whether or not the stories would work when you brought them into a fixed order?
NA: I’ll ask you. I think it works.
CB: Yes, of course it works.
NA: I think it works because I use the alphabet in order to arrange them. But not everyone is in it. David, for instance, is in the installation. With ‘D’ he would have landed in the film between Chowra and Edouard, who both tell really big stories: Chowra lost her mother, Edouard his father. Edouard tells a story about the Shoah. And Chowra tells a story about the Islamic Revolution in which her mother lost her life, because she was a militant. I couldn’t include David in the film, because his story is incredibly personal. It didn’t fit between the other two. There’s something between people. For example, how is it that two people suddenly tell stories about the good old days of Egyptian cinema? And other connections – how do they come about? Deleuze talks about rhizomes and Édouard Glissant talks about ‘le tout-monde’, where there are suddenly unexpected connections between cultures and languages. And that is what most fascinated me, that I use the principle of randomness at that moment. That makes a boom! In multiple, unexpected places, in details which are not at the centre of the story.
That is what most fascinated me, that I use the principle of randomness at that moment. That makes a boom!
BW: You begin PRÉNOMS wonderfully with the gift that not only God gave you, but your parents too, with your name, Nurith, and then you pivot to the only dead protagonist, Agnès Varda, and allow her to rise from the dead, and you begin with the sky and a glance into another future, a collective future. In connection to the film, we were also talking about the Paris of migrants, where the original state of humanity is one of many backgrounds and biographies. This may be a somewhat lofty question, but is it also in the end a film about your city and this life or, more universally, about life as such and humankind?
NA: Yes, you’ve said so many things – which pleases me too – that you’ve actually said it all in your question. I mean, this is the Paris I like, the Paris which is so international. And these are also my friends, who come from all over. This is the ‘tout-monde’, and where it meets. And in a way it is strange that everyone in the film speaks French. I think everyone in the film is French. In the installation, we have Ursula, the only one who does not speak French, and who is German. Okay, I live in France. For me, being a Jew from the Diaspora is important, because it has to do with the same thing. Jews were everywhere and I would like to be once again part of this ‘everywhere’ where Jews were, even if it was sometimes connected to things which were not easy. But they belonged there and they are still there.
For me, being a Jew from the Diaspora is important.
What I still wanted to say is that my mother is behind my introductory text in the film. I don’t say it in the film, but she gives me this new name, right? And that’s Zionism. You invent a name for the flowers because the flowers have no name. To invent the name, you take a name from two other languages. One is Arabic, where ‘No’ means light, and Aramaic, which was a Jewish language and in which ‘Nur’ means fire. And then you take this word, which already comes from two languages, and you make ‘Nurit’ from Nur. Because the flower is red, you give it a name, like a fire, like a light. Then you decide that this name is also a given name. This all happened within a few years. That is, my mother is part of this renovation of the language, which belongs to Zionism. And she knows it. I mean, she doesn’t think about it, she likes these flowers, she wants a little girl. My father, who is a German Jew, says, ‘How do we write this Hebrew name in Latin letters?’ And makes it Jewish, because he knows that Judith and Ruth end in ‘h’, so he adds an ‘h’. The Hebrew name does not need this ‘h’. Many Nurits write their name without ‘h’. By making it Jewish, he brings it back to the Diaspora, which is part of Zionism. The film will be released in cinemas on my birthday, 11 March. And for me, the idea of the discussion about the film is also part of the film, like in the Talmud. In the Talmud, there is a text in the middle and there are interpretations alongside it. And the viewers who come are now the Rabbis who make interpretations about the film.
