Das Gespräch wurde auf Englisch geführt.
Barbara Wurm: Rania, in other films you’ve made such as 74 (THE RECONSTITUTION OF A STRUGGLE) (2012), you’ve worked with re-enactment, as you do in THE DAY OF WRATH: TALES FROM TRIPOLI, and here you make reimagining oneself in another time into a very important element. Could you tell us how you decided to work with the younger generation in this film? It is of course helpful for foreign viewers unfamiliar with the history, allowing them to take on the perspective of that generation in a way.
Rania Rafei: First of all, re-enactment is something very interesting for me, and I’ve been trying to work with it in different ways. In the film 74, it was one kind of re-enactment where we went all the way. In THE DAY OF WRATH, I wanted to mix re-enactment with reality, to go in and out of it. That’s why in the very long interviews with the kids, we spent one hour really talking. We would come in and out of the re-enactment. I wanted to blur the lines between past and present, even for them. Those kids are very marginalized. They live on the outskirts of the city. They come from poor families. And the film shows they’ve been through war because there’s a zone in Tripoli where the war didn’t end. I wanted to use the past for them in re-enactment and to make them speak about their present. I would see what elements of their present they bring by imagining the past. I also wanted to question my place as a director, that’s for sure, because I’ve been having, not a crisis, but I’m reflecting again on the way I want to make films, on the way I relate to the Real. What does it mean to put a camera in the Real? What does it mean to remember with others? What does this collaboration mean? With the re-enactments, I wanted to question and reflect on my process, and not identify with it. In the film 74, the whole film is a process of re-enactment. In this one, I wanted this va et vient, back and forth. I always think that things are more blurred than we think. The generations are more blurred in what we transmit to each other – past and present, the buildings in the city and how people inhabit them. These elements are very fluid and porous. It’s precious for me to find those intersections and relations, to break up the rigidity of past, present, history, the old and new generations. I noticed while translating the subtitles how things are very interlaced in a sometimes unconscious, unintentional way.
Birgit Kohler: Another decisive element with the children seems to be, how is history and the past taught in school? What are they learning and what is not taught? What is not in the history books?
RR: In the first voice-over, I say, ‘I looked in your face for a long time’. I looked in the face of my father for a long time to try to see the child in him when he was old. It’s the same search, looking for the past and the present through many things. What you’re saying is absolutely something I was trying to dig into. What do we teach children? How do we teach history? With what kind of authority? What do we omit and what do we foreground? In one scene the girl reads a letter as if she was one of those kids and she wants to go die. She reads the letter and says, ‘Goodbye, my parents. Now I will die for the country because I want to be a martyr.’ This is a central subject in the Arab world: dying for the cause in Lebanon. At this moment, the teacher leaves the room, I think because she is very disturbed by the fact that what she taught in the class made this girl – she will not kill herself on the front, but she thought about death.
BK: She’s saying, ‘As a mother, I can’t really support that.’
RR: Exactly. She’s a very nice teacher and someone who thinks about things. She’s not very dogmatic. I know that she questioned the way they teach history in schools and how dogmatic and didactic it is. We are very much victims of a discourse all the time. A lot of people are trapped in this discourse too. Not only the younger generation, the older one as well.
BW: I want to ask about the title. You worked on the film for a long time and it seems to have kept the same title the whole time. I love the title, and there is something special about how you deal with ‘wrath.’ In a way, it seems removed.
RR: Because it hasn’t come yet! First, the question of how much time the film took is tricky. I started filming in 2019, but many things happened, I did many other projects. I’ve worked on the film since 2019, but not constantly. We filmed for 30 days total over about one year, very sporadically. I’m the editor of my film, so I edited for a long time, but not all the time. And I changed a lot during the process, many things happened to me, including to my relationship with cinema. I thought about changing the title several times, but I was so attached to it. After I finished translating the subtitles yesterday and when I finished sound editing, I thought, ‘Where’s the wrath in this film?’ Actually, it hasn’t come. It’s still very oppressed.
BK: There is some anger in the film, but not really what you would imagine as wrath. For instance, when the boy tells us that one of his classmates died in school because of negligence by the state, he is super sober. The children tell us things like, ‘Our country is doomed. This is the end. We are not able to manage the country like we should.’ And these are children! At the same time, especially in the last chapter, you can really feel the desire for change.
RR: Absolutely, that’s all there. For me, wrath has not come yet. In 2019, I was very present in the square, and I watched the possibility of change, and then everything ended. We’re very passive. I mean, people are very, very, very passive. I think the day of wrath hasn’t come yet. Also, I love Verdi’s ‘Day of Wrath’. I listen to it a lot. It makes me think of the moment when revolt and this energy of change will come. The children talk a little bit about wrath, colère. But I always feel it’s somewhere in the film, it must be, and it was somewhere in the past because kids have died.
BK: You reflect on history on the basis of several uprisings or protests and unrest from the 1940s to the present. At the same time, you interweave this with questions about your family, especially your father. How did this constellation of the personal and political come about?
RR: To tell you the truth, many times I felt the project was too ambitious for me. But I persevered with a desire. I think I wanted from the beginning to interweave the very personal with the bigger history, because it’s been present in our family too. My parents lived through the Civil War. I had a very special relationship with my father, who died while I was making the film. When I started filming, I went back to my parents’ house and to the city. I had not lived there since I moved away. I wanted to bring the city into our home and our home into the city, to make a patchwork, a work of fragmentation. I feel fragmentation inside too. The fragments in this film are my fragments. One of the boys, the twin, says that his father came home wounded when he was fighting the Israeli, and he had a wound on his hand. And I talk about my father putting stitches in the hand of a fighter, and taking me with him. It was a very demanding project, and I don’t have any pretensions about whether or not I succeeded. What I know is that I persevered.
BW: What made you choose this particular, very big time frame, a lifespan, and these specific times?
RR: First of all, I think 1943 is very important because it’s the year of independence. It’s the start of this whole project, this whole proposition called Lebanon. It’s very important for me. What was very interesting is that a massacre happened in the city, which a lot of people don’t know. That tells me a lot about our relationship to history. The 50s and the 60s were very important, especially the 1958 and the 1967 defeat in the Six Days War, because they affected my father a lot. I grew up in a house with the Pan-Arab dream. The 1980s are our life during the war and also what my parents experienced in their youth and part of the family becoming Islamist. I saw that the city is Islamist, and tried to run away to a left, to fall in the arms of a left where my identity could blossom. Then 2019, because I lived through it. I suspect this is all a reflection on what affected me and how politics directly or indirectly affected me and my family. Why the long timespan? I think I wanted to create an echo, like between two mountains, with 40 years reverberating between them. It’s a period when almost all these countries broke away from colonialism. Especially with what’s happening today in our region, I think colonialism, the dream of Pan-Arabism, the radicalisation in many cities, and the death of a certain kind of left and the attempt at revolt, whether in 2011, Arab Spring, or later in Lebanon in 2019, I wonder what’s happened to us? Where is the possible? Where’s the impossible?
BK: Could you talk about your approach to research? You’re out in public, talking to witnesses or passers-by, you go to the military archive too.
RR: I wanted to make a film with many layers. I wanted to show that history and a city have many layers and how those layers can talk to each other in a film. It was also very important for me to talk to the people in the street who are very marginalized. We have this square where those men sit every day because a lot of them don’t have jobs. I have a lot of tenderness for them because they’re always in the city. They’re part of the city. They’re always outside. I feel they’re very invisible. To show the individual when he is in his utmost solitude, and how the city comes to this individual and how this individual goes to the city. That relationship is very haunting to me. About the archive in France: I didn’t find anything about this incident in Tripoli. This is something precious for me to say in the film, that we don’t have archives. We don’t have the time Europe has to archive itself. You had the time after the Second World War to archive yourself. We are in a messy house and we don’t have time to organise. I find the archive in my city elsewhere.
BK: Earlier, you said you were questioning yourself as a filmmaker while making the film. At one point, you say you have the feeling that you’re inside and outside at the same time.
RR: I’ve had that feeling my whole life, of belonging and not really belonging, of always having this distance, this alienation in the city and the family. As a filmmaker, also, I really question my relationship when I put my camera in the street or in front of people – my relation to this. I’m talking about documentary, fiction is something else. What am I really doing when I do this? I don’t have the answers. But I feel I always question or I’m afraid of my own authority over this reality. What reality can I film or not? Even in my own city, I had these questions. I had moments when I thought, it’s not very legitimate for me to be here with my camera, the distance is not right. How do I want to work with those people to film them? This is why I think documentary is really, really difficult. It’s not simple at all to edit what people say. You have a lot of authority over reality and people. Sometimes I’m afraid. I’m scared of not doing the right thing. But I think it’s a question for a lifetime.
BK: Another really important element of your film is the voice-over. We hear your voice very often in the film. I’m interested in how you wrote the voice-over, because it’s quite delicate. You’re addressing your father who has died. So for me, it’s also a piece of mourning and a love letter. And at the same time, I was wondering if this is also true in terms of your relationship to the city. There is some mourning, but also an attachment.
RR: When my father died as I was finishing the filming, I kept on thinking about him, and I felt that I wanted a big part of the film to be addressed to him because he is the individual that, for me, weaves history from the 1940s until now. I started writing this letter, but many times before getting to the last version, I felt I was not being truthful. I felt I wanted to impress someone with this letter, and it was not really coming from the heart. So I rewrote, rewrote, rewrote and I took out the things that were not true. I was obsessed about the content, and I really wanted to write about moments I lived with him, about things I felt. When I say, ‘When you came back from work, I looked at your shoes,’ it’s really true. 90% of the voiceover – if not all of it – is things I felt and experienced and that are true for me. It’s not a voice-over that is ‘interesting’ or ‘intelligent’. Because I did write some fancy, smart sentences that I took away. For me, the voice-over is one of the most important elements in the film. Without it, there’s no film for me.
BW: You live half the year in France and half the year in Lebanon, and I guess it’s common for many Lebanese people to have this kind of in and out existence. Did it help you with this film? Do you think that it influenced the way you approached the topic, being part of it and yet sometimes being a little bit distanced?
RR: Absolutely. I mean, it’s impossible for it not to affect me. I’m inspired to make all my films from being in Tripoli. I don’t know why I have an attachment to the city, but I have a real project there. All the films I think about – fiction, non-fiction, essays – are set in Tripoli. I don’t know why. But when I leave and I go to my village in France, I feel like I have the distance to edit, to write. I need this distance so as not to be swallowed by the energy of the city. It’s exactly like someone you love. You look at him and then all of a sudden you want to look a little bit from a distance, to see. I can’t imagine myself being here all the time.
BW: A final question, what is left of the left in you? Because you said about your biography that at an early point, it was a model that you turned to.
RR: A lot, and now I think I’m about to make maybe a political party or join one. I think it is a personal question, but a very important one. I’m very occupied with why the world is turning this way. Without any pretension. It’s not me who will save the world, but I think a lot is left of the left in me, and I’m trying to find ways to gather. I know it sounds a little bit idealistic, but it is something that occupies most of the time in my thinking.
BW: It also has something to do with you being a woman and having a lot of male voices, but you also have a lot of women.
RR: Who are silent because women are silenced, who are invisible, actually. But they are here.
