In this career-spanning interview, British-Palestinian filmmaker Saeed Taji Farouky discusses his new film A Thousand Fires, political filmmaking, documentary filmmaking, and telling untold stories.
Saeed Taji Farouky’s A Thousand Fires begins its UK cinema run this Friday, November 4th. Click here for London tickets, and follow Saeed on Twitter to stay updated about screenings in other UK cities.
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Explore the spectrum between fiction and nonfiction in documentary filmmaking through films and filmmakers pushing the boundaries of nonfiction film.
An introduction to Saeed Taji Farouky
“I desperately want to make the kind of film that no one else has made. That’s partly just a creative choice … but it’s also a very political decision,” British-Palestinian filmmaker Saeed Taji Farouky told me. He was speaking about his new documentary feature, A Thousand Fires (2021), but it’s a sentiment that applies to his whole body of work. Farouky has been making nonfiction shorts and features, as well as — more recently — fiction shorts, for almost twenty years, both in the UK, and around the world, from Myanmar to the Arctic to Morocco.
Farouky’s films tell stories outside of the white, colonial gaze, in an industry that can’t conceive of what those stories might look or sound like. He told me, “Especially as a Palestinian, I’m extremely sensitive to how the reality of Palestine is misrepresented. I want to assert our cultural and political independence through cinema. For me, it’s a tool of resistance.”
Exploring power dynamics in filmmaking
Right from the start of his career, Farouky’s approach to documentary was atypically aware of, and willing to explore, power dynamics, even if it meant implicating himself as a filmmaker. His first feature, I See the Stars at Noon (2005), includes a sequence of his subject, Abdelfattah, directly asking Farouky for money to migrate from Morocco to Spain. The moment is striking: the times I’ve seen documentarians acknowledge, within the text of a film, whether they are paying their subjects is so small, I could count them on one hand. Or one finger (the only example that comes to mind is Rokhsareh Ghaeemmaghami’s Sonita). Farouky encourages the viewer to consider the transactional nature of his relationship with Abdelfattah, and how that might influence Abdelfattah’s participation in the film. It’s never as simple as a fly on the wall.
Saeed Taji Farouky reframes the narrative
This interview with Farouky feels particularly in conversation with a section in our ebook on documentary film, Subjective realities: The art of creative nonfiction film, which asks “How can nonfiction reclaim and reframe history?” That section largely features interviews with marginalised filmmakers, making films about marginalised characters whose stories have been obscured or twisted in the conventional telling of history. These filmmakers use documentary to resurrect and reclaim these stories from the typically white/colonial/heteronormative gaze of historians and the media.
While Farouky’s documentaries tend to document present day events, he is keenly aware of the history of film and media representations of the marginalised people his films represent. He’s careful to push against pervasive (and often racist and xenophobic) cultural narratives by finding another way into telling these stories, whether his subject is the oil industry or Afghan soldiers.
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Explore the spectrum between fiction and nonfiction in documentary filmmaking through films and filmmakers pushing the boundaries of nonfiction film.
In its tale of the unseen players in the oil industry, A Thousand Fires is part of a pattern in Farouky’s career: reclaiming the stories of people whose perspectives on recent history have been absent from mainstream media. This is directly linked to his interest in stories about colonialism; Farouky bemoans films about war, for example, that are “essentially the occupier crying because they feel guilty for killing innocent people.”
These stories are so often told solely through a western perspective, and we never see the other side. Tell Spring Not to Come This Year (2015) is about war in Afghanistan, but as Farouky explains, “the whole point was that we would see the experiences of Afghan soldiers, not like the 2,000 other documentaries that were made about foreign soldiers.” Similarly, I See the Stars at Noon offered a migrant’s perspective at a time when migrants were being massively othered by the media.
This mission also echoes in his fiction work. Farouky has directed two fiction shorts: They Live in Forests, They are Extremely Shy (2016) and Strange Cities are Familiar (2019). They Live in Forests, for example, provides a perspective on a colonial exhibition in Britain that we rarely hear: that of an Aboriginal Australian man, whose culture is being put on display. (The film is a period piece set in the late 1800s.)
“Especially if you’re doing a documentary, you have a huge ethical responsibility to those people.” Saeed Taji Farouky
As a political filmmaker, Farouky practises what he preaches. His behind-the-scenes process now involves having long conversations with his subjects about his role as a filmmaker, their role as the person in front of the camera — and yes, the money involved, too. When making A Thousand Fires, a film which observes the quiet daily lives of an oil farming family in Myanmar, Farouky made it clear to the family he was shooting with that the production could help out with clothing, food, medical care, or transportation. When Farouky makes films, he does everything in his power to create a collaborative, consensual, and mutually gratifying experience for all involved.
Farouky’s career so far is a fascinating tale. He’s been making films for around twenty years, in many different places (Morocco, Afghanistan, the Arctic, Western Sahara, England, Myanmar, and more), both fiction and nonfiction. He has five documentary features under his belt, including A Thousand Fires. Farouky is currently working towards shooting his first fiction feature. His life and career story tells of trying to sustain a distinct and distinctly political voice in a film industry (particularly in Britain, and particularly in the realm of nonfiction) that shies away from any kind of narrative or formal risk taking.
A career-spanning conversation
For this career-spanning conversation, I sat down with Farouky to discuss his approach to nonfiction, how he chooses the stories he tells, and how his nonfiction subjects have shaped the way he has been telling those stories over the years. For full transparency, I know Saeed personally and he has helped me with advice and filming space in my own filmmaking efforts. However, I think his fascinating insights in this interview speak for themselves.
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Explore the spectrum between fiction and nonfiction in documentary filmmaking through films and filmmakers pushing the boundaries of nonfiction film.
A conversation with Saeed Taji Farouky
Seventh Row (7R): How did your love of film begin?
Saeed Taji Farouky: I’ve always been obsessed with film. It was TV at first. It was seeing other stories and other lives. I had that experience where you watch films as a kid, and there’s a moment when you realise that they’re made by a person. There’s a lot of real stuff that goes into making this thing that’s fake.
When I really got into film, I was living in Bahrain. There was one cinema to go to. There wasn’t a lot of cinema culture. But there was a TV show, which was a behind-the-scenes feature [about] the latest releases. I was like, wow, these are real people making these things. It was almost like a film school. I was learning about the ‘making of’ process before I really got obsessed with cinema itself.
“When people talk about cinema as an escape, it’s never been that for me.”
There’s this great interview with James Baldwin, where he describes why literature is so important to him. He describes the moment when he realised that other people also go through the same suffering [as he does]. It’s a weird experience. You feel comforted by the fact that other people are also suffering, which is slightly sociopathic. At the same time, it’s a quick way of understanding the power of cinema.
Because I was growing up in a really awful house with a lot of violence, it was an escape. I would catch things on TV and realise that there was something that made me feel better. But I mention the James Baldwin thing because it wasn’t about fun for me. They were quite dark films. Somehow, it made me feel like I wasn’t suffering alone.
I think that that’s why I’ve always taken film incredibly seriously, probably too seriously; it means so much to me. It’s so fundamental to my life that it’s hard to just think of it as fun. When people talk about cinema as an escape, it’s never been that [for me]. It’s the opposite: diving deeper into the experiences of my life and trying to describe them to other people.
7R: How do you think that’s affected the kinds of films that you make?
Saeed Taji Farouky: I’ve never been satisfied with just the aesthetics. I’m very into aesthetics, but for me, it’s never enough. I must have been so pretentious as a kid. At, like, thirteen or fourteen, I was being critical of blockbusters that most people would just watch and say, “They’re great.” I was thinking, why are you moving the camera? Is it necessary? I understand the technique and the sensationalism of it, and I see the talent in making such a spectacle, but why have you done it? How does it contribute to the depth of the story, or my understanding of these characters?
I was always much more interested in the emotional aspect of it. Sometimes, the aesthetic contributes to the emotional, which is exactly what you want. But when it doesn’t, when it’s just superfluous, or it’s just there to impress, it really bothers me. In my work, I always want to recreate the experience I had first watching those films, realising that I wasn’t alone. Realising that cinema could express that in a way that I haven’t experienced with any other medium.
Why cinema, and why documentary?
7R: Why do you think it was cinema, as a medium, specifically, that you were drawn to?
Saeed Taji Farouky: It’s hard to answer because it’s like a tautology, right? Cinema is the best art form because I love cinema, but I love cinema because it’s the best art form. It’s hard to know.
Even before I was into cinema, I did theatre as a kid. I found it extremely comforting to be someone else, to act, because I was going through a lot. Acting and the whole atmosphere of theatre was this other world where you were twenty percent you but eighty percent someone else.
I was always half this really precocious, overacting clown and half this quiet, introspective kid. Theatre, and music to an extent, was a way that I could be open without being too vulnerable. It was a way of expressing myself that wasn’t necessarily really about me, but it was about how I was feeling.
I still feel that. I’m still much more comfortable showing a film than I am talking about them. It feels like a more real expression of myself. It’s the fiction, even in a documentary. It’s the construction of another world.
7R: When did you discover documentary, as a practice?
Saeed Taji Farouky: That was much later, I would say in university. I was taking some film classes, although I wasn’t studying film. It was an art history class, and one of the professors was a documentary filmmaker. I just started to love what she would show us. She was studying art history through her own films. She was just amazing: very comforting and very supportive; [She was] the first person who ever looked at some of my work and said, “You’re quite good at this.” Years later, I got in touch with her, became friends, and I worked with her on a film. I always joke with her that whenever my dad gives me hassle for not having a real job, I blame her, because she’s the one who encouraged me to go into film.
I quit engineering, which is what I was studying before. And I did this.
7R: There’s something about engineering and films. [Seventh Row editor-in-chief Alex Heeney] is also an engineer.
Saeed Taji Farouky: Oh, yeah?
There’s something about this geekiness, this nerdiness that, if you’re really interested in the making of film, there’s a very technical aspect to it. I’m interested in a very high level of precision, at least in my filmmaking. It lends itself to people who are also interested in a kind of scientific approach to construction.
I was interested in mechanical engineering. I also, ideally, really wanted to do theoretical physics, but I realised very early on that I wasn’t good enough at maths. There’s no way I could do it. But I love this philosophical exploration of the universe and time, and time travel. Now I just do it as an amateur.
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I have a theory of architectural cinema that I’m working on. A couple of my favourite filmmakers are architects. I think there’s a lot of similarity between the construction of space and construction of films, especially the way I like to make films.
The thing that I love about film is that we can intellectualise it for years, but eventually, if you’re making a film, you have to be there, unless you’re doing animation. You need real people in the same room with this mechanical device that supports light. And you have to do the thing. You must represent all of these over-intellectualised ideas as a two-dimensional combination of sound, picture, and time. That’s all you have. It’s very practical when you’re making a film. As filmmakers, when we’re there with the camera, we are working with people to do something very simple.
7R: When you actually film it, there are all sorts of unknown variables. Things just happen. And you have to embrace life. That’s different from, say, sitting down and writing a novel, where you have complete control over whatever you’re producing.
Saeed Taji Farouky: Which is another thing I love about film, especially documentary: it’s really telling you where to go. With actors, at some point, they’re going to say, “What do you want me to do?” I can’t sit there and talk about philosophy, because someone wants to know, “Where do I put my hand?” It feeds both sides of me, one which is extremely pretentious and sometimes overly intellectual, and the other, which is very practical and wants to solve a problem.
What I love about the architectural metaphor is that it doesn’t have to be linear. I’m breaking out, as much as I can, of linear storytelling now, to a point where it feels like I’m building a space that people can explore within the film, as well.
I See the Stars at Noon (2005)
7R: The earliest film of yours I’ve seen is I See the Stars at Noon. How did that film come about?
Saeed Taji Farouky: I was becoming more politicised in university. I became an activist; I was campaigning. It’s hard to say when it was a good time to be an Arab or Muslim in the UK or the US. It’s never been great. But my time at high school was during the first Gulf War, and the first invasion of Iraq. University was just before September 11th, and just before the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. I became very politicised.
Cinema plays a big part in our construction of the political world: it plays a big part in manufacturing consent, in creating ideology. I became really interested in how film could work against prevailing ideology.
I had tried an [office] job for a year and a half at an architectural model-making firm. This is also a big influence on me, these incredible models. As a kid, I used to be really into these beautiful, metre-high models of giant buildings that would open up and then you could see inside.
I didn’t like the job, so I became a tour guide. Anyway, I ended up in Morocco. By the end of my contract, I realised there was such a huge difference between the Morocco that I was showing tourists, and the Morocco that working class Moroccans would experience. They were talking to me a lot about the Harraga, the illegal migration or secret migration.
“Nobody was really asking the important questions about why people were doing this.”
At the time, there was what the European press was calling this ‘unprecedented wave’ of migration from North Africa. It was people from all over Africa, but mainly going through Tangier to southern Spain. It was overwhelmingly from the European perspective: European filmmakers and European documentary filmmakers. I found it very exploitative, very sensationalist. Nobody was really asking the important questions about why people were doing this. They sort of assumed that Europe was better, and people wanted to come here for work, etc. A lot of tropes and a lot of racist representations.
I thought, what if we tell the story from the perspective of someone trying to do this thing? I didn’t know if I could make a film, but I borrowed some money, bought a camera, and gave myself a month in Tangier to find someone who was willing to tell the story with me. Within three days, I met Abdelfattah. It all happened very quickly.
7R: Was it difficult to get him to trust you?
Saeed Taji Farouky: No, not really. It’s quite difficult to talk about that film, because I feel like I was a bit naïve. I think he also just wanted someone because he was very alone and felt very vulnerable. I think he did trust me in reality, but I think he also saw that I could help him with money or moving around, which was all true.
It just became this incredible experience. I mean, very quickly, everything I had ever thought about documentary film was just falling to pieces, in a good way. That scene in the middle of the film, where he turns to the camera and says, “What about me?” Even after filming the whole thing, I came back here, and I showed it to Gareth, an editor who’s my close friend. I said, there’s a story here, but we have to cut out all the stuff where he talks to the camera, because there’s just too much. Gareth said, no, that’s the best part. We didn’t really realise at the time that we were doing something… I don’t want to say ‘new’, but it wasn’t a very common technique at the time.
How I See the Stars at Noon shaped Saeed Taji Farouky’s career
7R: There are all these parts in I See the Stars at Noon where Abdelfattah challenges you directly about your approach and your motives. I imagine it must have really shaped the way you approached documenting people’s lives, going forward.
Saeed Taji Farouky: Absolutely, yeah. It was a huge moment for me. I realised the level of construction and obfuscation in a documentary. I didn’t really think of it as a political act at the time, but discussing the exploitation of people in a film, discussing the idea of money or privilege and power imbalance within the film itself… now, I do it intentionally as a political act. It’s very disruptive to the industrial model of documentary filmmaking, which has no interest in talking about these things at all.
7R: When you watch documentaries about people who are financially struggling, it does cross your mind: how much money went into making this film? Who’s behind the camera? What is their responsibility to intervene financially if they’re able to? But the accepted thing is that the documentary filmmaker does not cross that line.
Saeed Taji Farouky: That’s partly why I didn’t want to talk to him about it at the time. I thought that the role of the documentary filmmaker was to not get involved. In some circumstances, that’s still true. But especially if you’re doing a documentary, you have a huge ethical responsibility to those people. You can’t just say, “Well, that’s not my job. I can’t get involved. I’m not going to cross that line.”
The moment when he asked me for money, I had to ask myself, okay, this guy has become a friend of mine. What’s more important to me: this really abstract rule of journalism that you never pay people you’re working with, or my responsibility to him as a human being who’s desperately in need of help? My responsibility to him won in the end. That’s always my main priority in the films I’ve made since. In fact, the films are much better when those people are fully invested. They understand why they’re making a film with you. They understand on what basis you’re making the film, and they know they’re not being exploited.
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7R: Were you reluctant to be an audible presence in the film?
Saeed Taji Farouky: I was very reluctant. But I realised it was unavoidable. Abdelfattah needed someone; he wasn’t just talking to me because he needed money. He desperately wanted someone to talk to, to understand his life, and to put it into context. That’s also why I make films.
It’s very difficult to navigate, this idea that you have a responsibility to the people that you’re filming with. I think we’re acknowledging it more now. But it’s also created its own structure, its own industry of campaigning documentaries, or a documentary where the viewer is made to feel like they can be part of the solution. A documentary where it has a social media campaign, and that becomes a major part of the film.
I have a lot of issues with that kind of almost apolitical, liberal approach to political documentaries, where you try to make something about a very complex political issue, but you make it palatable for a centrist audience. You give them a solution that requires no structural change whatsoever, like signing a petition or giving money to someone. I am glad that there’s much more awareness of the role documentary plays in shaping that reality. But there’s now a sort of capitalist industry of the benevolent documentary film that I think is ultimately doing harm.
Building a career in the film industry
7R: I imagine it must be difficult if you’re making slightly unconventional documentaries, about less documented topics, to get funding, because it’s harder to neatly package the film’s ‘impact’.
Saeed Taji Farouky: I think it’s extremely difficult, if the core philosophy of your work is that you’re telling stories that you’re not seeing other people tell. By definition, they’re going to be much harder to fund.
7R: Is that part of the reason why you’ve made so many more documentaries than fiction films?
Saeed Taji Farouky: Because they’re cheaper, you mean? [laughs]
I think I just really had this burning desire to engage with reality first. I mean, I fell in love with cinema through fiction. I’ve always wanted to make fiction. For many years though, I felt like I really wanted to be engaged with reality.
7R: I only made that assumption because I noticed you have made a few fiction shorts lately. They Live in Forests, They Are Extremely Shy was even a period piece. I imagine that requires more robust funding and support than a project like I See the Stars at Noon, where you only needed you, a camera, and a real situation.
Saeed Taji Farouky: That’s true. I think it also became a career, right? I’ve made my own films. But I’ve also filmed a lot of documentaries and news stuff for TV. That became a source of income. It became clear that because I speak Arabic and I look a certain way, I can work in the Middle East. I can work in a lot of places and sort of fit in. I had a bit of a reputation for being able to do undercover work or more difficult work that other people wouldn’t, or weren’t able, to do.
It was pretty well paid, and it was work that I loved doing. There’s something very political about it to me. If you go into a country where the regime doesn’t want you there, you film something they don’t want to be seen, and you put it on TV… that, for me, is extremely powerful. As somebody who is inspired by radical politics and militancy in cinema, to find a way to enact those beliefs through film is really fulfilling to me. That’s a tangible form of resistance.
And then I would make my own films, which were essentially the other side of that story. I took a lot of time to look at, for example, what was being [made about] Iraq and Afghanistan, and asking, what are we not seeing? That’s why it took me twelve years to make a film about Afghanistan [Tell Spring Not to Come This Year], because I work very slowly, and I watched and questioned: what are they not telling us? I want to cover the parts they’re not telling us.
“I want to cover the parts they’re not telling us.”
The problem is, you come up against not only the intransigence of the industry, but also the prejudices and the racism of people who are financing it. With the Afghanistan documentary, the whole point was that we would see the experiences of Afghan soldiers, not like the 2,000 other documentaries that were made about foreign soldiers. They tell a story that’s, for me, extremely disingenuous, which is essentially the occupier crying because they feel guilty for killing innocent people. There’s an important story to be told there, but not in the way that most filmmakers were telling those stories.
In trying to finance it, we continually came up against: why would people want to watch Afghan soldiers? How are we going to relate? In other words, they don’t even recognise the basic humanity of people from Afghanistan. People were suggesting that my co-director [Michael McEvoy] present the film, because he’s a white British guy. They wanted to recreate all the other films. They couldn’t see the value in telling a different story. I come up against that with every film I make.
The first trip for the Afghanistan film, Mike just put his own pay check in. We filmed it, because we had to prove to people that this could be done. That was successful as there were people who realised that we’d never seen this kind of footage before.
I became a bit savvier about how things are funded. You start to realise how you can propose something in a way where you get what you want out of it, but it also gets financed.
Has the film industry changed over the years?
7R: Do you find that the industry has become more receptive to the kinds of stories that you’re telling? Or has it not changed as much as people might hope?
Saeed Taji Farouky: I guess I’m going to sound very bitter if I say this, but let’s be honest. In the early 2000s, back when I started, documentary film was not as big as it is now. It didn’t have the same respect, and it certainly wasn’t making much money. It was always, and sometimes still is, very marginal.
When I started out, I could get a bit of money. I could put a film together, and then mail a VHS tape to a TV station, and they would buy it. My first funded film, I walked into the office, pitched it, and the guy said, “I love it.” He gave me a budget of $20,000 and told me to come back with the film. Absolutely no way that would happen today. The industry has become more professionalised and more industrialised, and it’s become bigger. That’s great in many ways, because a lot more people are making a lot more films, and a lot more people have the opportunity to make films.
The downside is that along with that growth comes increased commodification of those films. As soon as an industry sees the financial potential, they want a product. There are more documentaries being made every year than ever. They’re making more money; their budgets are higher. But now there’s this extreme stratification where we have the mega-documentaries that are extremely well funded and make a lot of money and get released in cinema. And you have the kind of radical documentaries that those mega-documentaries have no resemblance whatsoever to, which is the kind of work I’m interested in making. But they attract all the attention.
7R: [Jokingly] So you don’t want to make a true-crime documentary?
Saeed Taji Farouky: [Laughs] You know, those aren’t even the worst. For me, the worst is the celebrity retrospective that is just PR. With a $15 million budget. I can actually watch the true crime stuff and be entertained, right? This celebrity stuff, for me, I actually find really offensive, like, very soul destroying. For a lot of reasons: ethical, financial, creative, whatever.
It has just become a mirror of the fiction industry, which can be a real downside. It also means that the people I teach now, or mentor, have a model that’s very different from what they want to produce. In some sense, although the industry is bigger, and there are ‘more opportunities’, there is, I think, less for radical filmmakers or someone who’s trying to make experimental work. There are fewer examples of those succeeding, because the industry is now so financialised.
A Thousand Fires (2021) and Saeed Taji Farouky’s other works
7R: How do you come to a subject for your films?
Saeed Taji Farouky: I think my films are becoming less and less structured, and more and more impressionistic, plotless, and nonlinear. However, the approach is very technical, in a way. It’s very journalistic. It’s a lot like what I would do when I was actually working with journalists. I have a very vague but central idea. I know I want to explore that idea, but I’m not interested in making films about ideas; I want to make a film with people. So I have to find a way of embodying those ideas.
There’s always a huge difference between that initial approach and what actually ends up happening. The initial idea might be the war in Afghanistan. I have to ask myself, how do I show this in a way that hasn’t been shown before? Or the one about Iraq, which I did, as well, or oil.
“I got the idea to make a documentary version of There Will Be Blood.”
My latest film [A Thousand Fires] was about oil. And that’s really it. It just starts with me thinking, how do we represent this incredibly complex thing — this concept, this industry, when we don’t even have the ability to grasp its scale, or the reach of its tentacles. Oil is this thing that we can demonise and hate and hold responsible for the collapse of the climate. And yet, it’s almost impossible to avoid being complicit in it.
I would just research. I had this really long process, kind of like a magpie, finding anything and latching on to it. With [A Thousand Fires], for example, I got the idea to make a documentary version of There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007). That was the original pitch of the film. And then we had to find that person, or that place, the whole thing.
We did research, like I would do as a journalist, where I thought, okay, where are places in the world where we know there’s oil, but it’s still not a huge industry? Because if you don’t know there’s oil yet, I’m not going to wait ten years for exploration. If everybody already knows about the oil, forget about it. The majors are in; they’re already drilling it. We need that sweet spot. The research included interviewing oil experts, interviewing guys who work on the rigs, interviewing geologists.
7R: How long was that research process?
Saeed Taji Farouky: I had the idea in July of 2016, and the research never really ended until we were done editing. I think we started filming at the end of 2016. But I would say that things didn’t really fall into place for another two years, in the sense of having some idea of what kind of film I was actually making. We found a lot of places that fit. But there were some that were war zones, and I didn’t want to be in a war zone again. Just by chance, somebody showed me this photo essay of these hand-built oil wells in Burma. My producer and I were amazed. That was it. We went out there, met with a Burmese filmmaker, and just started exploring.
Even filming, for me, is still part of the research. There’s never an end to pre-production and getting into production.
7R: How long were you filming that for?
Saeed Taji Farouky: Four years. But a year of that is just research. For me, I start filming immediately when I’m doing something. It’s like sketching with a pen. I know that that material has almost no relationship to the film, but I just need to see things on screen. It’s the difference between intellectualising a film and actually making it. But it’s also getting used to the people and getting used to the place. People need to get used to the camera. It’s kind of this ritual. For the first two visits or so, I really wasn’t filming with much purpose. I was just filming as a collector, gathering research material.
Building a relationship with the subjects of A Thousand Fires
7R: At what point did you meet the family at the centre of the film?
Saeed Taji Farouky: I think that was the second visit. I just saw Thein Shwe working, and there was something about him. I was really drawn to him. He partly reminded me of my dad, in a strange way. He had quite a tough exterior, but there was a smile there that represented his warmth. And he was also interested in me, which is important. We were curious about each other. But there’s no logical explanation. It’s just seeing someone and feeling some kind of connection.
7R: You mentioned the importance of building trust with your subjects. Was there a process of you both learning to be around each other, especially with a camera there as another presence?
Saeed Taji Farouky: It was a very long process. In the years since I See the Stars at Noon, I’ve developed this approach where I meet someone, I start filming with them, and we’re both curious about the process.
Early on, I have this very long and honest conversation with them, where I explain what I want to do. I let them know that this is my job, how long it might take, and the kind of film I’m interested in making. I ask them if this is something they want to work on together, letting them know that I might show up out of nowhere, three or four times a year, be in your house for a while. What are your boundaries? What are you interested in discussing, or not interested in discussing? How can we support you? It’s a very honest conversation about, essentially, the collaboration or the working relationship. If that doesn’t work, you can’t make the film.
I think a lot of people that I’m teaching or that I help to mentor get in this position where they say, ‘I have a problem with my film where the person doesn’t want to be in it anymore, or they don’t agree with whatever.’ And the fact is, it just means they’re not the right person for this film. There are very few films where you can continue making it under those circumstances.
“I felt this genuine love for this family.”
We had that conversation, and he was clearly curious about me, and the family was curious about me. And then, maybe on the second or third trip, I was doing these long interviews with him, although they never made it into the film as they were just for research. He asked me, why did you come halfway across the world to make this film? He [suggested] that maybe we were related in a previous life. That was an amazing way of looking at this thing that I thought was just luck, or coincidence. Because of the way he sees the world, he thought, ‘There’s something here. There’s a reason why this person met me. We got along, and we felt this connection.’
As for the mother, there’s a reason why she felt like I was part of the family. It’s not just that I hung around for two years. There was truly something there. I felt this genuine love for this family, like real, deep affection. But it was all based on this honest conversation, where if they needed something, we would help them out. If they needed clothing, food, medical care, or transportation, we would help them out.
The nonlinear approach to A Thousand Fires
Part of it is informed by their ideas of Buddhism and reincarnation, rebirth. That became part of the film. That’s why I say people make much better films when you’re both deeply invested — you and the people you’re working with. Their entire concept of life, and this idea of galactic time, became part of the film. That’s why [the film is] structured around these cycles; it’s not linear anymore. When someone believes they are one reincarnation of thousands of reincarnations, over tens of thousands of years, then it’s nonsense to say, ‘I’m going to make a film that is deterministic and linear.’
7R: What does that mean, practically, when you’re editing the film?
Saeed Taji Farouky: I don’t film deterministic episodes. I’m very resistant to it. As soon as I feel like I’m making this kind of chapter, where A leads to B and then to C, I just stop filming. I’m just not interested in it. It feels unimaginative to me, and I don’t want to make that kind of film. The footage has all these deliberate holes. Thus, we have to make associations that are more impressionistic, because we don’t have the connective tissue in between.
It’s also about reflecting on how you bridge the intellectual and the practical. I must give most of the credit to Catherine [Rascon], who was the editor, and was incredible. Genius, even. She’s amazing at just putting a stop to this kind of intellectualising bullshit. I would come to her and say that I’ve been reading about these theories of transmigration of the soul, and she would say, okay, where is it? Where’s the footage? Because if it’s not on screen, there’s nothing there; it’s not in your film.
7R: With film, you have to make the intellectual become practical. That can be quite challenging.
Saeed Taji Farouky: But that’s the beauty of it, for me.
7R: I find that in film criticism, too. In order to be truly effective, you can’t just describe the abstract feelings a film evoked in you. You have to think about what choices the filmmakers practically made to make you feel that way. But it can be really difficult to get a grasp on.
Saeed Taji Farouky: Something else that helps with me is that I’m most interested in creating a sensation for the audience. Essentially, all I’m ever trying to do with a film is get viewers to feel the same way I feel. So we essentially started with the last sequence, which is very common for me in film, especially in my fiction stuff. I very often have the last scene written, then I try to work backwards.
We had this sequence of three shots, and the song that, very early on, we felt was an essential part of the film. Most importantly, there was this feeling of melancholy. These parents’ son had the chance at a better life that every parent wants their son to have, but at the expense of breaking the family apart. There’s a very political aspect to it, which is that he has to become part of this ultra-capitalist machine.
But there are also benefits to that. There’s something almost inevitable on one hand, that move from rural to urban. It’s something personally desirable to him. But there’s also a huge price to pay, which is that he still ends up in a system of exploitation and not necessarily much better off, or much happier than he was when he was with his family. And ultimately, he’s alone.
For them, as parents, although a lot of this is my own projection, there’s this calm. They have finally achieved balance, but at the expense of breaking the family apart. I wanted that melancholic balance at the end of the film. And then we work backwards.
Crafting the sound design of A Thousand Fires
7R: When you talk about creating sensations for the viewer, I imagine that sound is a big part of that. How do you approach the sound design for A Thousand Fires?
Saeed Taji Farouky: In documentary filmmaking, you often put a lot of work in to make something just feel natural. A lot of it was just reproducing layers that I experienced, but weren’t captured on camera. They’re not actually there.
7R: Some people may be taken aback by the idea of documentary sounds not being real, but I find it really interesting: how documentary filmmakers are recreating the experience of being there, rather than presenting exactly what was captured on the ground.
Saeed Taji Farouky: There are times, for example, in my Afghanistan film, where we refused to use sound from a sound library. It was very important to us that we only had sounds that we had recorded. We’re dealing with the legacy of war films, even war documentaries, which are so focussed on creating this sort of fictionalised and sensationalised version of reality. We didn’t want to do that. The truth is that gunfire does not sound dramatic in reality. It sounds very banal, and it’s not intimidating. To recreate that and make it dramatic, to us, was just feeding into this fictionalisation of war that makes us unable to really understand what war means.
On A Thousand Fires, it was very different, because from the beginning, it was almost a magical realist film. There was mythology in there anyway. There was this heightened sense of reality, so there was no problem with using sound libraries.
We were very lucky that we had an incredible sound library that was from Burma. My journalistic side still crept in, when we needed bird sounds. I made sure that they were birds that you’d find in that region of Burma.
“What I always want in films is density of image, sound, and meaning.”
The creative side was just creating density. What I always want in films is density of image, sound, and meaning. I love very simple images, and very simple sequences, but where the film has profundity and meaning is in the density of those images. Sometimes, that takes the form of visual metaphor, and sometimes, it’s symbolism; sometimes, it’s a reference to folklore and mythology or history. Sometimes, especially in documentary, you record for ten hours in order to find one tiny gesture that means so much. The sound, for us, was creating that density. How do you add meaning to a very simple image without overwhelming it, and without dialogue? That’s the least interesting way of conveying information. I don’t use dialogue to convey information. I do use dialogue to convey personality or emotion.
The film is so claustrophobic. The [4:3] aspect ratio kind of pushes you in, but it’s also very close to the family. We need to imply the much bigger world outside, but without showing it, because the film was always very dedicated to just the perspective of the family. We never look at the oil industry in general, or the politics of the country, because those things never affected the family. If they were engaged in politics, then it would be in the film, but it’s absolutely not. They live in a very remote area. Their goal is just to have a life that’s not impacted by the world around them.
Every once in a while, we need to imply the scale of the world. Sound is the only way in film to imply what’s outside the frame.
Making films that push against mainstream narratives
7R: You’ve talked about the idea that there are existing mainstream narratives, and you want to create films that rebuke that. To what extent are you thinking about the stories that you’re telling as, in a way, a correction?
Saeed Taji Farouky: A lot. I desperately want to make the kind of film that no one else has made. That’s partly just a creative choice, because if it’s a documentary, let’s say with the Afghan documentary, this is something that takes three years of your life. You’re literally risking your life to make it. Why would I do that and end up with a film that two thousand other documentary filmmakers have made?
But it’s also a very political decision. Especially as a Palestinian, I’m extremely sensitive to how my world and the reality of Palestine is misrepresented. Right now, I’m writing a fiction film [about Palestine]. I’m very conscious at all moments that I want to assert our cultural and political independence through cinema. For me, it’s a tool of resistance. I’m not just reflecting the world as it is in a conventional documentary. I’m trying to enact some of the values that I believe in.
“I don’t want to teach people anything.”
But then, that has a limit, because I don’t want to simply do this kind of political rhetoric, and make a film that very clearly is trying to teach you something. I don’t want to teach people anything. But that in itself is a reaction to most political filmmaking. Both fiction and documentary are often really desperately dedicated to teaching us something about the world. I find that a very boring way of approaching film. I don’t think documentary cinema is the best way to ‘teach’ people information.
There are so many films that come out, where I think this should have just been an essay, or this is just a research paper with images. Cinema is about movement and time and emotion and engagement and depth and density of image. It’s a craft, at the end of the day. If I’m going to make a film, I’m not just going to make something functional that you consume and then you’re done, and you’ve learned something new.
7R: I guess ‘teaching’ can mean many things. You could be, in a much more abstract way, teaching people a new way to think about something, or teaching people a new way to see a certain type of person, or to see them at all. In the traditional sense of the word ‘teaching’, I think you’re right. But I also think that in many ways, whenever you watch something, you’re being taught something, even if it’s reinforcing a viewpoint you already had.
Saeed Taji Farouky: The word, to me, implies that I know more, and I’m imparting the knowledge, which I don’t think is very true. I think there’s a functional response to being taught, which is that you then do something with that knowledge, right? Maybe this is rather nihilistic of me, but I don’t see most films, or most cinema, as a practical way of ‘changing the world’. For me, my priority is much more: how do I represent the world in the way I see it? How do I understand myself better?
Now, I do think that that can lead to certain revolutionary politics, for sure. But it’s not a one-to-one relationship. It’s not a functional lever that you pull, and it makes someone do something. The word teach, for me, has that implication.
7R: You’ve mentioned the responsibility you feel toward the subjects of your documentaries. How have you navigated how your responsibility to those people extends beyond the end of shooting? How do you avoid just entering a community, getting what you need from them, and leaving?
Saeed Taji Farouky: A lot of it depends on the people you’re working with, right? It’s great for us to say, I’m going to engage with them and support them for the next twenty years of my life. But they may not be interested in that. For some people, it was a great experience, but they want to be done.
I’m still occasionally in touch with Abdelfattah, from the first film I made. It’s a difficult relationship, because as you can see in the film, it’s quite manipulative, in many ways. It’s not necessarily the healthiest friendship, but it still exists. With Salah from The Runner (2013), we still communicate, and that film still forms part of his activism. When it shows, he often gets invited; he’ll do an event around it, whatever it is.
With A Thousand Fires, that wasn’t that long ago. I’m still in touch with the family, especially now, because there’s been this violent coup in Burma. I’m always just worried about whether they’re safe or not. But all throughout, we supported them as much as we could, with food, clothing, medicine, transportation, whatever they needed while we were making the film.
“The goal of most of my films is just to complicate something that I feel is over-simplified.”
I think there’s also the problem that the only examples we usually see are the bad examples, like where a filmmaker really exploited someone. I think what we need is to see really good examples and understand the different ways that you can enact that ethical approach. It doesn’t always have to mean setting up a campaign and sending them money. It doesn’t always have to mean having a petition you can sign to solve this problem.
The goal of most of my films is just to complicate something that I feel is over-simplified. If you’re doing that, there’s almost no way you can have a campaign that’s related to it. When we were making Tell Spring Not to Come, a lot of the people who were interested said, what’s the campaign we can attach this to? Raise money for the Afghan army? Unfortunately, it doesn’t make sense. What is the campaign? Perhaps the campaign is the end of the occupation? Maybe, but that’s not something you can just sign. The campaign is to never invade another country in the way that you’ve invaded Afghanistan. These aren’t things that you can solve easily.
Picking long, evocative film titles
7R: To switch tracks a bit: I’m curious about how you choose your films’ titles. They’re very distinct.
Saeed Taji Farouky: [laughs] Yeah, I quite like long, evocative titles. I’m very judgmental about titles. It just breaks my heart, the number of people that work for years on making these really creative, beautiful films, and then call them The House, or something. I just think, why are you doing this to yourself? It’s appalling. It’s so depressing to me. And, of course, the reasoning, most of the time, is marketing. I get loads of shit for my titles all the time. But my philosophy is that this is never going to be a big commercial film. Somebody is like “Tell Spring Not to Come This Year doesn’t fit on the film listings on the TV menu. It’s too long.” I just think that my film is never going to be on the TV menu [anyway].
7R: I don’t think it’d be on the film listings on the TV if it was called The House, either.
Saeed Taji Farouky: Yeah! I’m not making it for that audience, anyway. And the other thing is, I don’t entirely believe the marketing wisdom of short and snappy, because those film titles are also very forgettable. I would much rather have people say, oh, that film with the long title about spring. At least they’ve remembered something and it’s evocative. Rather than The House [laughs].
The first thing I always do with participants in my workshops, when they come up with the name of their film, is go on IMDb. Inevitably, I show them that there are two-hundred-and-fifty-seven other films called Home. What are you saying that’s new? There is a marketing aspect to this. If you’re telling me you’re making something new — which you better be, because why are you even making a film if not? — then your title better tell me the same thing.
7R: It’s funny, because for you, A Thousand Fires is a pretty conventional title.
Saeed Taji Farouky: [laughs] Oh, yeah. That one I was like, is that too short?!
Working in fiction filmmaking
7R: As we touched on earlier, it’s only in the last five-or-so years that you, as a professional filmmaker, have been making fiction films. What prompted that?
Saeed Taji Farouky: I’ve always wanted to make fiction. I think there was a big change for me around Kenny Richey. It must have been 2007, maybe. I was doing a lot of human rights work around the death penalty. There was a Scottish guy called Kenny Richey who had been on death row in Ohio, and was then exonerated, and came back to the UK. He was really angry and bitter, as you would be if you spent ten years of your life on death row.
The British press essentially tore him apart. I mean, this was like a character assassination. All because he was not the grateful exoneree that they wanted the story of. He wasn’t giving them this kind of catharsis that they wanted. He was angry, and he would get angry at the journalists for asking him stupid questions, or thinking that they were asking the tough questions. But really, they were just rehashing the years of interrogation he’d already been through. They treated him like shit.
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I wanted to make a film with him. But they told me that he had signed with a publicist. He had already been consumed by this industry that was really just interested in grinding up people and getting the juice out of them. That was disheartening to me. Firstly, because I couldn’t make the film, but secondly, because he was clearly extremely vulnerable. A shark was representing him, basically. So I wrote a fictional play that was based on that story. That was the first time I realised that these two formats could work together.
They Live in Forests, They are Extremely Shy (2016)
With the fiction stuff that I’ve made, they also start out as the same kind of research project as my documentaries. The only difference is that when we get to making it, it’s with actors.
I think what’s important is that when I’m finished with research, I leave it alone. I’m not trying to embody that information in the film. It just becomes the foundation. So with [They Live in Forests, They are Extremely Shy], we did a lot of research on Aboriginal Australians, on the British Empire, the use of these colonial exhibitions, the ownership of relics from colonialism and occupation, and the display of body parts in colonial exhibitions. When I finally started working with the actor [Tommy Lewis], it was really his story. It was about me expressing something that I felt, and him expressing something that he felt. We just embodied that through the film, rather than trying to express the information I learned through my research.
7R: I really loved that film. And I think you rarely see a film that’s that short [four minutes] which is able to express something so profound.
Saeed Taji Farouky: I’m really happy with it. I’m really happy with the actor, Tommy Lewis, but he died a couple of years ago. We had this idea to make a longer film out of it, because he had told me in the beginning: this issue of our relics in museums is a hugely important subject. He taught me so much also about how to work with actors, about how to tell a story that was real to him. He put me through a lot before he agreed to this film. I had to meet him over and over and over again. He had to really trust me.
He’s someone who, from the first moment he started acting, he really split his community. There were some that saw him as a success story. And there were some that said, you have betrayed us, because you’re representing our culture in a white man’s film. He had to learn to live within those two worlds. Without going into a long discussion, that’s very similar to Palestinian filmmakers who often have to navigate representation and politics and how we work in that world.
He said to me, this is a really important story. No Aboriginal Australian filmmaker would ever get funded in Australia to tell this story, and no white Australian would ever want to tell this story. So, you’re the only person that can do it, because you’re neither of those. You have another perspective. He didn’t have to say that. It was very meaningful for me.
Teaching a “radical film programme”
7R: Outside of your films, you’ve also mentioned to me that you occasionally teach filmmaking to young people on weekends. Can you tell me a bit more about that?
Saeed Taji Farouky: Yeah, we call it a film school; it’s not really a film school. I guess you could call it a radical film programme. It’s supposed to have as little in common with conventional film school as possible. It’s very messy and anarchic; it’s not very structured. A lot of it is about what the participants need to get out of it.For example, we generally don’t look at composition, or specifically, conventional composition, unless they want to. We don’t analyse the scripts of mainstream films. The main, let’s say, philosophical difference between this and a film school is that film school generally prepares people to work in the industry as it exists today. We’re interested in figuring out ways to create alternative industries.
The most important part is just creating a community of people who support each other. That’s why I don’t even consider it teaching. In a way, the lessons that we do, which sometimes are practical, are really just an excuse to bring people together. Some of them have never met people like them who want to do the same things that they do. We’re talking about participants where many of them are from low-income backgrounds. They never imagined they could make films anyway. It’s just the power of two people in a room recognising themselves and a shared love of cinema in each other for the first time in their lives.
Saeed Taji Farouky’s upcoming projects after A Thousand Fires
7R: What are you currently working on?
Saeed Taji Farouky: I’m going to return to Palestine with a fiction feature film that I’m writing now, but it’s also very influenced by A Thousand Fires. I really fell in love with this idea of rebirth, reincarnation.
While I was making A Thousand Fires, I was doing a lot of research into Burmese folklore and mythology, and the way it influences life. When you’re making documentaries, there’s an urge to relate it to an existing piece of fiction to give it some structure. I found myself going to, for example, classic Greek drama, and asking myself, what kind of classical story does this film remind me of that I can hang it on as a framework? Eventually, I realised how ridiculous it was. It’s a film with Burmese Buddhists, and I’m Palestinian. I know almost nothing about Greek tragedy. I didn’t even study it at school. It has no relationship to my culture at all. Why is Greek tragedy the default narrative structure?
The influence of Arabic folklore
I started looking at Arabic folklore and Palestinian mythology. That became a big influence on me. Not in the sense of making a film that is a folktale, but just the incredible richness and imagination of these stories, particularly in structure. There’s this idea that there is a classic three-act structure that everything has to follow. I’m supposed to think of that as the ideal version of storytelling. Meanwhile, there are Arab folktales from eight-hundred years ago that are told in reverse with a story within a story. They have reverse causality where that storyteller goes on a journey, because of something in a book, and they come back and they read the book, and the book tells the story of their journey. It’s an incredibly creative, iconoclastic form of storytelling. That’s way more imaginative than 99% of the stories that are being told today.
Storytelling that’s based on oral traditions has a very different structure to written storytelling. It was essentially to keep you company on long journeys, so there was no incentive to reach the conclusion as efficiently as possible, which is sort of the structure of European storytelling. [Seventh Row recommends reading our interview with Indigenous Canadian filmmaker Loretta Todd, who has a lot of fascinating insights into storytelling based on oral traditions.]
Where to watch Saeed Taji Farouky’s films
Saeed Taji Farouky’s A Thousand Fires begins its UK cinema run this Friday, November 4th. Click here for London tickets, and follow Saeed on Twitter to stay updated about screenings in other UK cities.
Click here to watch some of Farouky’s shorts.
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