Basma: Of course. Yeah. Very simply, it was a film that I made in reaction to the 2014 war, which at the time was also described as genocidal. I think a lot of people forget that today, but it was the third of Israel’s large-scale military attacks in Gaza. Most of my family in Gaza had left at that point. I thought, how is it possible that we had a war that went on every single day that Israel wanted it to with the blessings of the United States, and we watched this on screen, and nobody was able to stop it?
I just felt like, okay, so the civilization has failed, and that doesn’t mean that the Palestinian struggle is over, that there is a way for them to erase Palestinians off the face of the earth and the way that they very clearly seem to be trying to do. So what does that mean? It was a question, and it was a question with a lot of resentment behind it because I also felt like, what does the accumulation of all these images and all this information and all of this work towards our liberation or just even justice in our cause, was like, why is it for nothing? How is it possible that this continues to happen?
And so I wanted to make a film that took Gaza out of its isolation. So we stopped saying, “this is a unique thing. This is a unique problem. This is only because of them”—and whatever excuses. I don’t even want to dignify how they justify the bloodthirsty killing that’s happening in Palestine, but that how do we take this out of its isolation and reflect on it through different landscapes? So it’s just a film that takes Gaza… The byline is sort of, it pays homage to Gaza through looking at it through different civilizations and other people, other struggles, and other landscapes. And so it’s a meditative landscape film that begins and ends with Gaza and in between is taking you on a journey through this character who is just a vehicle for looking at these different landscapes in which we pause and look at different constructions, different moment, very brief moments.
But that for me was just asking the audience to consider: why is Gaza being repeatedly destroyed? But you can have a thirteenth century castle in Brittany that’s protected, and what does it mean to be a Native American who’s speaking a language that has almost gone extinct, which is the language that’s used in the beginning and end of the film. It also draws connections with an Italian, anti-fascist writer that is quoted in the Italian section of the film who was exiled to the south of Italy by Mussolini for writing against the war in Abyssinia. And so these things are not necessarily obvious, they’re coded in the film. But it’s enough for me to just plant them in the film in these really, I hope, lush landscape scenes and to have them collapse into each other, to not just look at Gaza as this or Palestine as this unique unexplainable case, but to think, yeah, no, this is part of a longer story, a longer history of upheaval and oppression without actually linking it only to other struggles, but to link it just to other landscapes and take it out of the specificity of the current time and just look at it within the larger scheme of things, I think in a very a-traditional way.
I’m not an intellectual. I’m not someone who’s really into theory. So for me, it was more about making something visceral again, like that you could experience that you would see Gaza and you would see it in relation to other sites, and you would see it in this different way than you might be used to seeing.
Marina: Yeah, that makes sense. And I mean, I really appreciate the nod that this is not exceptional, that it is part of these other crimes against humanity that have happened forever, but also to really challenge the viewer to say, okay, well why this and not that? Why do we care about these other things? Because they’ve recorded it in history books or because they’re in a different place. But yeah.
Nabra: Another element of Ouroboros that actually just yesterday at a Dunya Productions meeting—which your aunt is part of, Manal, so shout out to Manal for also connecting us—some folks brought up the desire or need to share alongside our narratives around what’s happening right now in Palestine. Also the beauty of Palestine and the beauty of Gaza for people to better understand more deeply the loss and mobilize folks through art, through beauty as well. And I brought up your film because this Ouroboros, it shows these incredible landscapes and this beautiful homestead of this woman who’s walking through what I’m guessing is her space or orchards and such. And yet it doesn’t also shy away from everything that you’re talking about, all of the commentary and the connections to other global struggles, and also the destruction of those landscapes. So it beautifully balances the celebration, the beauty, and the loss and crisis. So really appreciated that and it’s very difficult to do in art, to be honest as well. So something we’ve been talking about a lot at Dunya Productions.
Basma: That’s great to hear. It means a lot to hear that. Awesome.
Nabra: I was wondering if there’s a piece of yours that you feel especially resonates today. I mean, we’ve talked about Ouroboros, but is there something else that has been on your mind a lot lately that you’ve created in the past? Thinking about… I didn’t know or I didn’t really register that Ouroboros was from 2014. So is there any other pieces, older pieces that you want people to return back to for the present moment?
Basma: Or just a correction that Ouroboros is from 2017. I started working on it in 2014 in response to the war in 2014.
Yeah, I mean, actually it’s a very interesting question, this, because I made this film, I think in 2014 actually, called O, Persecuted, and it was a commission by the London Palestine Film Foundation. Yeah, the London… I can’t remember what exactly they were called, but it was a commission based on engaging with films from the PLO Archive. Like a lot of the propaganda films that were made in solidarity with the struggle that were not only made by Palestinian filmmakers, they were restoring these archives and asking a few artists to engage with the material. I was one of those artists, and it wasn’t just to make film. I mean, there was I think Antonia Shibley, the writer was asked to contribute in a text or various things. So I’d been invited to engage with a film I could pick, but they sort of suggested a few.
And I came across this one film called Our Small Houses by Kassem Hawal, who’s actually an Iraqi filmmaker who made this film in a very particular moment that looks at… that sort of puts Palestinians and Israelis side by side in the struggle as persecuted people who are now thrown together to fight for liberation in a way. I mean, it’s definitely from looking at Palestinians and their struggle, but sort of equates them in this way that I felt was like, “oh, we’re so far from that moment.” Look at how this film was made, I think in the early seventies, I would say. And it’s very powerful, it’s very beautiful, and it’s really talking about, just for me, it talks so much about how… I don’t know how to characterize it anymore. I mean it was a long time ago, but it was so real to me in the way that the struggle just permeates into everybody’s lives.
In that moment it’s the people on the ground in Palestine. And I was thinking, now we’re in this phase where it’s everybody, all Palestinians in diaspora. You have Palestinians who were born and raised and never stepped foot in Palestine who are so dedicated to the cause. It’s, like, frightening, actually, in a good way, in a very good way. And I felt like it’s such a different moment from when this film was made and yet there’s something persists, and how do we address it? And what is it that’s changed? And how do I address that visually? So I made this film that’s very experimental, that’s shot in black and white sixteen-millimeter film where I’m painting over a projection of the film and then I run it in reverse so that it looks like I’m uncovering the film. I don’t know if that makes sense if you haven’t seen it. But it’s just basically black and white scene of someone that looks like they’re removing paint, let’s say lifting paint off of a wall. And underneath is this film that’s playing out by Kassem Hawal.
So you hear it and you sort of see it, but not very directly. It’s like the soundtrack is quite obnoxious and aggressive. And at the end when the film finishes, when the credits are about to roll, it’s disrupted by this YouTube footage of, it’s like spring breakers. It was all taken from 2014 during the war of all these super hot girls in bikinis partying in Israel, in Tel Aviv, or in Haifa, or whatever. And in Israel, it was this sort of advertisement, “Come to Israel, the raves are amazing, the women are hot, everything’s great,” all this stuff. So I ran those two films together in this very violent way. So we’re coming from the black and white to the sudden very saturated party footage. And then I added a Gabba soundtrack, so very hardcore techno-sounding soundtrack. And in the background of those scenes is a Greek belly dancer, very orientalist, that sort of appears and disappears in the background.
And so the film was, yeah, it was posing a lot of questions about how women’s bodies are used and how we think about Israelis versus Palestinians in terms of the struggle and how violently far away they are from each other. How these archives that are being restored are almost from a different world, actually, compared to what we have today. And what does it mean to be a partying Israeli while you’re massacring a population for your security? These were the questions that I felt were being posed in this film, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the film.
I mean, it doesn’t show that much, or it didn’t use to show that much because I think people are freaked out by it. I mean, it premiered at the New York Film Festival in the experimental program, and I felt like people were avoiding eye contact with me back then afterwards. And then I used to feel like, oh, I need to always be there for the Q&A of this film because it seems people can’t decode it, or it feels really aggressive or, yeah, I don’t know. And I don’t know why, to be honest. I know it’s an aggressive film. It’s very visually aggressive, but I mean, politically it’s not saying anything new. And I feel like since for me, it was like an eerie prediction of this, what happened at Nova Festival. It’s how do you justify, I’m sorry to use this language, but a fucking rave next to an open-air prison?
It should just make everyone sick. We never need to justify violence. But how do you justify that? How did the world know that this was the situation, the case, and then completely not understand why there was an attack? A complete inability to contextualize. And so I’ve been thinking about my film, this film from ten years ago, which seemed to be saying that in a way and has been shown a bit more now since, because I feel like it clicked for certain audiences that this was not an attack. October 7th wasn’t something that just fell out of the sky by bloodthirsty animals. This was in response to decades of violence and the very cruelty of something like a rave happening next to two million people under siege for seventeen years on top of decades of occupation, I think. Yeah. So I feel like I keep thinking about that film. It’s definitely less poetic and less gentle, but it makes me happy that it seems to be getting a bit more recognition, not because it’s a peace of mind, but just that it’s clicking for people. And that makes me, in a sense, relieved to not have to keep explaining why these things… why there is violence from the Palestinian side.
It’s an engagement between the maker and the viewer, I think, where, I’m just organizing the things in a particular way and then saying, “So what does it mean? Let’s together figure it out.”
Marina: I mean, I’m glad it’s clicking too. I guess I can and I can’t believe it’s taken so long for certain things, but I hope that anyone who’s listening who could program it somewhere continues to. So this film sounds like it really is putting things together in a way that is now resonating with people, hopefully, more. Although it sounds like, I mean, as we know it should have before too, because you’re right. In 2014, we were using the language of genocide to describe what was happening in Gaza. I sometimes find myself without words for the situation, so unbelievable is the word that I’ll go with right now. But it has felt believable because we’ve seen it continue.
This season with Kunafa and Shay we are using performance art sort of as our umbrella term thinking of “What is performance?” And we really talk about theatre a lot on the podcast. And so, we really wanted to also talk about things like experimental film and artists who are doing these multidisciplinary things that aren’t really lumped into just a theatre landscape. How do you feel experimental film fits into the realm of performance art, or installation work if you do, I guess?
Basma: I mean, I think anything that takes a more commercial form and sort of questions how it works, they’re all connected in some way, like experimental music and experimental or performance art or experimental cinema, poetry. Anything that is… it’s not that it’s rejecting a particular form, it’s actually acknowledging a particular form and saying, “Well, what else can it do?” Or, “How can we use that to sort of subvert or cause people to think differently about something?” So it’s very useful in that sense, and I think it’s come to sort of be understood as marginal or hard to decipher and maybe a bit pretentious. And I sometimes agree with that, to be honest with you. Sometimes I feel like, why is this form so unbearably dense and unpleasurable and hard? And it’s the questions I ask myself about my own work. I’m not always happy when a piece is maybe being met too much with questions or inability to read the material.
I don’t think that’s useful always. And as artists, I think we decide how much we veer into a very niche, specific kind of reading of a work or work that’s made for an audience that can decipher it because they’re in that world or if we’re trying to reach a wider audience. And always, it’s a sliding, what do you call it? It’s a spectrum of, for me, sometimes I want things to be way more legible, sometimes I don’t. And I think, yeah, if that was the question, I’m not sure if I understood it correctly, but that these different fields are really useful as ways to explore and question and try new things and get people engaged in working a bit harder or being, I don’t know, curious—again, not just being fed something, not just sitting back and having the work do the thinking for you, but asking you to do thinking and to be complicit in what the meaning is of a piece.
I find that really pleasurable, I think, when I feel I’ve been presented with something that’s a little… In an unusual form that I have to really question like, “Oh, is this what was meant?” Or, “What do these things all mean together?” This kind of thing. It feels exciting and it feels like I’m participating in the work. You know what I mean? I don’t know if that makes sense, but it’s like you’re participating in making the work meaningful through your reading of it. And I think that’s what I appreciate in with my own work when someone has read it actually. And it can be not exactly how I intended, but I appreciate what they bring to it and how they’ve read it. And I think that’s so much of experimental work is what you bring from your background and your knowledge.
And I think it’s, in my sense, the same across the board. I feel that way when I see performance that I’m less familiar with, performance or music that’s more experimental, where it’s not really… I don’t know it. I didn’t study it. I don’t understand why making sound in this way is interesting or legitimate, but I have to think about it. And sometimes it really clicks and other times it doesn’t but I think I appreciate that. I like the process of reading.
Marina: Yeah. That feels really meaningful too, that you’re talking about expanding, I don’t know, genres in a way that’s sort of more capacious, but also the importance of the audience. You need the audience member in a way that I mean, yes, theoretically, I hope that we need audience members in narrative theatre pieces because we hope that there’s also interpretation and understanding happening, but it sounds like they’re playing a different role here in experimental film, and that’s really meaningful to have such a conversation and to really want to be in a different kind of dialogue, perhaps, with that audience.
But actually, the accumulation of people making work, Palestinians or otherwise, making work about Palestine is building towards liberation.
Nabra: I also keep thinking about what you said about accessing the visceral, and in these more experimental forms, I find myself needing to trust what I’m feeling viscerally more. Again, there’s not that narrative to tell me why I’m feeling the ways I’m feeling or what the story is. It’s that gut, whatever emotions are coming up, whatever you’re noticing is what you need to use to work to figure out what this means and what this means to you. And so it feels like this form also connects audiences to the visceral more directly. I don’t know if that’s also your… It sounds like also that resonates with what you were saying earlier about where you try to go with your work.
Basma: Totally. Totally. Yeah, I mean, because it’s also an active process of myself questioning. I mean, sometimes I have a hard time explaining what a work is or what… I have a hard time summing it up because, for me, it’s also questions that I’m posing through this very structured form. I mean, experimental is also for me, is not totally, there’s an aspect of it that’s very free, but there’s an aspect of it that’s highly structured and very precise in how I’m making something. And I think oftentimes it’s, I’m trying to work through something. I’m asking these questions of myself in this form, and so it’s not that I’m like, “I have the answers” and I’m proposing it to someone to try and figure it out. I feel we’re both figuring it out together. So it’s an engagement between the maker and the viewer, I think, where, I’m just organizing the things in a particular way and then saying, “So what does it mean? Let’s together figure it out.”
Nabra: So what are you working on right now, if you don’t mind revealing?
Basma: I don’t. I mean work is hard in this last year, I have to preface by saying that. And I think it’s important to talk about, because I think a lot of makers right now are feeling—like writers and filmmakers, musicians—all of us are feeling quite crushed I would say. That it’s a really difficult moment to keep making, and yet I have to convince myself of this often. But I think it’s really important to keep making because it’s, I think Mohammed El-Kurd actually talked about this in an article he wrote that was published in September of 2023, so right before the beginning of the genocide. And he says something about, “what is art for art’s sake,” in this more or less, let’s say, I’m paraphrasing in this moment, “how does it contribute to the struggle and is it really going to liberate us to keep making art?” And by the end of the article, he’s sort of explaining that every piece is kind of an accumulation of something. And it’s really powerful to read that, I think, as an artist: that no one poem, no rap song, no film is going to liberate Palestine. And it’s not going to… you can’t use it at a checkpoint. But actually, the accumulation of people making work, Palestinians or otherwise, making work about Palestine is building towards liberation. No single one thing.
And I’m using that now to keep working because it’s hard. It feels futile in certain ways and, honestly, a bit grotesque to be sitting around thinking about production when people are being rounded up and exterminated in Jabalia right now. It doesn’t sit well, but I think I’m trying to work…
I had this idea for a piece that looks at… So I’ve moved to Berlin, sorry to preface this… I moved to Berlin almost five years ago during COVID, and it was kind of a happenstance. I wasn’t planning to move, but I ended up deciding to stay, found an incredible community, but I have a child and decided maybe this is a good place to raise my child, which sounds a bit funny now. But it’s the third time technically that I immigrate, that I’m an immigrant somewhere in my life, and I’m really sensitive, I think, to questions of integration and how migrant populations are treated. It feels like that’s the history of my life is just being a foreigner everywhere under the mercy of different governments and states and national identities and all this bullshit. So it’s the third time doing it. I have a child, so I’m seeing the effects it has on him and the school system. And Germany’s a very, wow, their culture is very present and very dominant and, frankly, very xenophobic and racist.
And so I started, this was before October of last year, I started developing a kind of short, actually narrative film, much more narrative than anything I’ve done, that would look at—the big ideas of it are, it’s looking at integration and how migrant populations are treated through the experience of a child entering kindergarten and experiencing separation anxiety. And making a parallel between the separation anxiety we experience as children, as the one we experience as adults, as immigrants, to places when we can’t go back home. And so it’s a very kind of poetic, visceral, again, narrative in three parts where we’re seeing a father and a son in their morning routine. And as the child gets dropped off for daycare, that ends in a sort of surprising way that I won’t reveal. But so I’ve been in development for it much slower than usual, but I should be shooting early next year, actually. And I was going to say, so I had this idea before October, and the piece is really critical of Western cultural hegemony and the racist policies that Europeans have, especially Northern Europeans, against migrants, specifically Arab, but sort of all migrants.
And when October happened, I was just like, “Never mind. Why would I make this film? This is ridiculous and forget it, and I need to not make work actually for a bit.” And then I brought back up the project of one of a friend was asking me about it, because the people commissioning it actually were still very much encouraging that I keep making the work, and I have to really thank them for that.
But yeah, I brought it up to a friend saying, “What on earth am I… Why would I make this film?” And she told me, “Actually, I think this film speaks to what’s happening in Palestine so much without directly addressing it, which is, anyways, impossible right now.” And, yeah, so I got encouraged and developed the script and started to put the pieces in place and feel against all odds, we’ll try to make the piece happen and we’ll see where it goes.
Marina: Thank you for sharing that with us. It’s been an incredibly hard time for… I mean, just to be a human and to be watching this happen, and then also to be making art on top of it when… I appreciate the Mohammed El-Kurd, like that it’s cumulative, that adds up to something. And I’m in a Palestinian book club with Noor, Basma’s cousin, who… we’re just giving shout-outs to the family members of Basma.
Basma: By all means.
Marina: We’re reading Wisam Rafeedie’s Trinity of Fundamentals, which was recently translated into English and some other… That’s sort of spiraled into us reading other prison literature. The book was written while he was in prison and then smuggled out of prison, and now it’s translated, and it’s in circulation. But it’s interesting to me that him and other political prisoners have chosen fiction as this media that they have written accounts of their lives that are fictionalized for, I think, I’m sure legitimate reasons, but using this medium to be able to communicate something with this audience. And I feel like the prison literature in that way is also a cumulative where I feel like, oh, I’m getting this education in this fictional way, but it’s still really giving a piece of this larger puzzle that is necessary for my life but for maybe all of our lives. So yeah, it just felt like a tie-in with how you were speaking about it.
Basma: I mean, it’s interesting that you bring that up because also, one of the things that really, really, I mean, to go back to your first question, one of the things that really inspired me when I was a teenager was the work of Cuban writers. And I’d never been to Cuba, I didn’t know a Cuban person. I had never met a Cuban person. I was growing up in Chicago, and someone had given me Reinaldo Arenas’s But the memoir itself just blew my mind, and really I felt like I was there, and it’s the story of his life. But then I then read his other works, which are really experimental and weird and very hallucinatory literature. So he’s someone who fought in the revolution for Castro and then becomes ostracized by him, imprisoned, publishes his memoir or other… I can’t remember if it was the… smuggled several of his books out while he was imprisoned and then eventually is out of prison, and then is in exile in the United States.
He just lived a life of immense struggle and just trauma and has these incredible books, this incredible literature that I found. So I don’t know, they would just transport me into another world. They weren’t even necessarily explaining to me the history of Cuba or what their struggle was. I mean, in part, yes, I think I started to understand it, but it’s a place I’d never visited and didn’t know anyone from, and I thought, “This is so beautiful.” He made work against all odds when it was totally useless or hopeless, not useless, hopeless, and it reached me. This teenager in Chicago who was Palestinian in diaspora, and it just gave me the sense of, “This is what we have to do, because it’s important when you’re not under the bombs and when you’re not living under occupation, to have also this…” It’s like a testament to your will to survive is to make art, to make something that isn’t actually for your survival, but it just really… I don’t know.
I think it reaches people in this way that’s really powerful and really… Yeah, I’m not saying this in the right way, but I was so moved by this writing, and then when I went, I got to go to Cuba actually for the first time, I think, two or three years ago. Two years ago, three years ago. And it was so funny to be there and to think this place, actually, I owe the reason for starting to make art, because it was a question, why do this frivolous thing? Does it amount to anything? And then being handed this book and thinking like, yes, absolutely. It’s very powerful. It’s very important to make art that isn’t just political and documentary and whatever, but stuff that can make you imagine things and dream, and I mean, just in response to fiction, to enter these worlds that aren’t real is super important.
Marina: Yeah, very much so. Yeah, I think I’m on a whole Palestinian futurity kick with some of the films that I’m watching and thinking about, and it feels very difficult to be thinking about the future right now, but also immensely necessary, especially when if you’re in a position right now to be able to think about the future, then it needs to be done so that those who are not able to think about it every moment right now can also then join in.
Nabra: Well, we’ve come to the end of our time together, and that’s a beautiful way to end to thinking about the future and reflecting on what art even means right now, which is a lot of this season, to be honest, what has come up this season from so many artists considering what that means. So thank you for illuminating that for us as well Basma, and for all of your work.
Basma: Thank you so much for inviting me to this and to the conversation, and for the very thoughtful questions.
Marina: This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of Kunafa and Shay and other HowlRound podcasts by searching “HowlRound” wherever you find podcasts. If you loved this podcast, please post a rating and write a review on your platform of choice. This helps other people find us. You can also find a transcript for this episode along with a lot of other progressive and disruptive content on the howlround.com website. Have an idea for an exciting podcast or TV event the theatre community needs to hear. Visit howlround.com and contribute your ideas to the Commons.
Nabra Nelson & Marina: Yalla, bye!
