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Eliane Raheb discusses Miguel’s War and using creative documentary techniques to explore her subject’s life and trauma.
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I realised that Miguel’s War was going to be a boundary-pushing documentary as soon as the film’s subject, Miguel Alonso, responded to a probing question from director Eliane Raheb by laughing and exclaiming, “What a horrible bitch!” Raheb tells the story of Miguel, from his childhood in Lebanon, to his participation in the Lebanese Civil War, to his life in Spain, where he lives today, as an out gay man. But she’s just as interested in exhibiting the difficult process of getting Miguel to open up as she is recounting the facts of his life. This is a film about trauma — how it distorts and represses memory, and makes it hard to be honest with yourself and other people. For Raheb, it was just as important to include takes of Miguel (jokingly) calling her a bitch, declining to answer questions, and struggling to recall the truth than it was to include his eventual honest answers.
“I said from the beginning, it cannot be a film that would be edited in a normal way,” explained Raheb, who edited the film herself, as well as producing and directing it. “I have to reflect that we are friends, and he was afraid of me at certain times, and I was pissed off at him at certain times.” Raheb, who lives in Beirut, met Miguel when he was the interpreter for the Q&A of a Barcelona screening of her 2012 documentary, Sleepless Nights. That film also dealt with the residual trauma of the Lebanese Civil War, and it brought back memories for Miguel. “After [the Q&A], we went to a bar, and he vomited on me his story,” recalled Raheb. “I really say vomit, because he was talking, talking, talking for two hours.” In the years that followed, Raheb started working on the film, and she and Miguel became friends.
Raheb splits up Miguel’s War into four chapters: the first three are “Michel” (which was Miguel’s birth name and the one he used growing up in Lebanon), “Miguel” (the name he chose for himself when he moved to Madrid), and “Barcelona” (where Miguel eventually settled and built the life he leads today). The film is only vaguely, not strictly, chronological, often jumping back and forth between Lebanon and Spain, and past and present. As Raheb explained, “When [Miguel is] telling you his story, he doesn’t say it in a chronological way. He would say something and then something else, and then you are with him in Spain, but you feel that his emotions are in Beirut.” The first three chapters refer more to the different identities that Miguel has adopted in his life than they do to a place or a time. The fourth chapter, “Love, Only Love,” is where Raheb and Miguel look to the future, and attempt to find catharsis. As Raheb puts it, they are asking, “Can we find love, and what is love?”
Raheb “wanted to find a way [to tell the story] that really resembles Miguel: his baroque personality, his contradictions, and his multi-layered persona.” She achieves this by mixing a multitude of different creative techniques, forming a patchwork of a fractured life, rather than a crisp, linear story. Miguel’s memories are presented through 2D, collage-style animations, many of them colourful and bizarre, some of them mixed together with live-action footage. Raheb and Miguel also explore Miguel’s memories by auditioning actors to play people from Miguel’s past, from his mother, to Tony, an unrequited love of Miguel’s whom he fought alongside in the war. These actors play out scenes from Miguel’s past, and the camera captures him watching, or sometimes even playing a character in the scenes.
Raheb also includes herself on screen in the film, not just to illustrate her friendship with Miguel, but because, as she says, their stories share “patterns which we all live in Lebanon. It’s how family, religion, and politics mess with your life if you are not a conventional person and your identity is not a mainstream one.” Raheb’s own parents appear on screen in several scenes, and they even tell a personal story of their own: that of her father’s ex-lover, a Spanish woman called Paquita, whom Raheb and Miguel tried and failed to find in Spain. By including herself in the film and discussing her own feelings of otherness, Raheb highlights how Miguel’s story is not an anomaly. For Raheb, “It is a metaphor for the powers that rule us in that region [of the world]. It shows how they can mess up the identity of someone and make him become self-hating.”
Shortly after Miguel’s War premiered at the virtual Berlinale, I spoke to Raheb over Zoom, who was calling in from the mountains in Lebanon where she had retreated “to be in nature, because I was suffocating in Beirut, in the sound mix [wearing a] mask.” She had only locked picture on the film a week prior, and Miguel had just seen the finished version for the first time the day before. With the film fresh in her mind, Raheb discussed its origins, her various creative approaches, and how the filmmaking process was healing for Miguel.
Seventh Row (7R): Has Miguel seen the film?
Eliane Raheb: He saw it yesterday. I sent him a link. He saw it with some friends, because he was not happy knowing that people were watching it and that he wouldn’t be able to watch it. It was not in a screening room; it was just a big TV.
7R: What was that like? What did he say?
Eliane Raheb: He already saw a rough cut last year, and he liked the rough cut. He was really, really afraid about what the film would be before seeing the rough cut. But when he saw the rough cut, he told me, “It’s an honest film.” And yesterday, he assured me, “It’s an honest approach to my story.”
I think there are things he is maybe not realizing now, but will realize later, when the film will be watched by [more] people. They will interpret something which he was not aware of. It’s always like this when you make a film about a person and it goes to an audience. It’s not your story anymore. It’s your story plus the story of the person watching it.
7R: Could you tell me the story of how you and Miguel decided to make Miguel’s War?
Eliane Raheb: It was a very random encounter in Barcelona. I was showing a film of mine [Sleepless Nights], and he was the interpreter of the [Q&A]. That film I was showing was also about the confessions of somebody who was really, really involved in the war, in the militia. Miguel was watching the film, because he wanted to do the translation after, and at a certain point, he [left] the screening room. I was outside, because I don’t watch my films with people all the time. So I [asked] him, “Why are you out? Go in!” I pushed him inside.
After we started the [Q&A], I felt that he was not at ease. He was very emotional. Sometimes, he was sweating. I [wondered], why is this guy so emotional about the film? It was intriguing. After, we went to a bar, and he vomited on me his story. I really say vomit, because he was talking, talking, talking for two hours. I didn’t have any pencil to write; I was just listening. I was leaving the next day at night, so I [asked] him, “Can we meet again in the morning?” And he said yes. So he continued for another three hours, maybe.
When I went back [to Lebanon], I was on the plane, writing whatever he told me; I didn’t want to forget anything. It started to inhabit me, his story. I went back to Barcelona some months later, and I [conducted] a very long audio interview with him for nine hours, over three consecutive days. I was interrogating him. And then I told him, “I think this story is very good for a film.”
He did not believe that I wanted to make a story about him. [He asked,] “Why is it important?” I told him, it carries, for me, a lot of meaning. It is a metaphor for the three powers that rule us in that region [of the world]: family, religious institutions, and politics, which sometimes are led by the state or by militias. It shows how they can really mess up the identity of someone and make him become self-hating. He really hates himself and was unable to assert his own identity.
This is our main problem in that part of the world. We are still ruled by these three big powers. [Your are not able to] live your identity freely, [whether] it is sexual, or different from the mainstream, or if you are an introverted person, or if you are a weak person, or if you are not a conventional, mainstream, cliche of a [desirable] person. You always feel alienated and feel that you have a double life. You are something in front of your parents or [in front of] society, and then you are another person underground or in other countries.
I call this film a trip. A trip for him, of course, because we are confronting the ghost of his past, and we are trying to give a meaning to everything he did. And a trip for me, also, as a filmmaker, because I was trying to see, how will I tell this story? When he’s telling you his story, he doesn’t say it in a chronological way. It’s not like a chronological story that goes from A to B, and then you understand [him]. He would say something, and then something else, and then you are with him in Spain, but you feel that his emotions are in Beirut. He can live a situation that happened thirty-seven years ago like it’s happening now.
This was challenging for me. How will I tell this story? I wanted to find a way that really resembles Miguel: his baroque personality, his contradictions, and his multi-layered persona. This is why I’m mixing all these mediums together, because I thought that [I must use a] multi-layered form for such a complex story.
7R: Watching the film, I imagined it must have taken a long time to edit. You’re telling Miguel’s whole life story using many different creative techniques. How did you approach the structure of the film?
Eliane Raheb: I am the editor of the film. I have this material with Miguel which, of course, I have written before shooting many scenes. I did a [lot of] research, so I could expect what he would say in the moment. I knew how it would be. I felt that the text of the film was already done before shooting, because of those interviews I made. So how will I show it? And how will I bring the text into sync with the shooting and the scenes? That was quite challenging.
It was also [confusing] for Miguel if I am his friend, or if I am the filmmaker. I usually don’t become close to characters [as a] friend until the filming is over. It’s always very, very disturbing to manipulate images of your friends. Even if you are honest, you have the power. But I became friends with Miguel before the shooting and in the shooting. It was a long shoot, not in terms of days, but in terms of years, because we didn’t find the money in the beginning. So I was shooting parts and shooting parts, and then coming back and shooting. There was this relationship between us which [deepened].
I said from the beginning, it cannot be a film that would be edited in a normal way. I have to reflect, as much as possible, everything. I have to reflect that we are friends, and he was afraid of me at certain times, and I was pissed off at him at certain times. It has to reflect that. Things he told me in the [original audio] recording, [he told them differently] during the shooting. So I felt that no one can edit this film but me. I knew [the material] in my guts. I have to [make the film] as if I am making a dress, sewing it from the beginning to the end. And I have to [include] things which maybe are not necessary. An editor would say this is not necessary, but for me, it’s very important.
There is this American filmmaker who does documentaries, and he’s a film critic, as well. His name is Robert Greene. I saw his films in 2018. It was a revelation for me that you can put your character in every frame. I had to put Miguel in every frame, andI shouldn’t be afraid of that. [Greene’s films] gave me the confirmation that it would work.
We don’t care if he’s in Spain, or in Lebanon; the space is not important. It’s the emotional space that is important, not the physical space. I had in mind that it’s a novel, a documentary novel, in the sense that I can go from something to something else, just because there is a feeling that I want to do it. It’s not because it’s logical.
The editing took about one year and a half. I was trying things and then resting for some time to see them again, and to see if it works or not. Also, we had a revolution in Lebanon in 2019, and I was very involved. I was on the streets for three or four months; I didn’t touch the film, so I lost time. And in the pandemic, of course, I lost time. I was supposed to finish in spring 2019. I don’t see it as a problem, because it helped me to look at the material [with some distance] and to say, “I’m satisfied.”
The animation took a lot of time. Doing animation in a documentary is very tricky. You have to start with a draft: the animator would do some animatics, to see if it works. How do you get out of [the animated sequence]? How do you get into the animation?
I had hoped for a bigger budget, but it was not possible to have it. Producers and funders don’t like to take risks. This film was risky, really risky. Nobody understood what I was trying to do. (laughs) Unless they saw it completed.
Sometimes, they told me, “Well, we don’t like Miguel.” It was very weird, because I’m not doing a film because I want the people to like Miguel. We’re not a charity and I’m saving him. A part of [Miguel] is that you should not like him, because he did everything to construct a wall for people to not like him, almost on purpose. So this mixed feeling of the viewer — sometimes you would really like him, sometimes you would really hate him — if you meet the real Miguel, it’s like this. Mixed feelings. For me, it was a result of how these three powers make you somebody who doesn’t like yourself, who is unable to accept yourself, and who feels inferior and then suddenly feels superior.
I had to show this, and the funders didn’t give me the chance to do the film like I really wanted, with the means I wanted, like having a big team. I was paying for the animation from my own savings at the end. And I’m doing three jobs. It was painful in that sense. But I think that this also makes it special, because it’s an intimate film. You feel that it’s auteur-driven, because the director is involved in many things. It’s not like I executed the film, and then went away.
7R: Very quickly into watching the film, I really fell in love with Miguel. And then, as you said, the further into the film we get, you start challenging him, and his darker sides come to the surface. How did you think about the viewer’s relationship with Miguel and how that would change throughout the film?
Eliane Raheb: First of all, I usually think of a viewer as somebody who would participate in the film experience. I don’t like passive viewers. I don’t like to give them everything and make them happy in their comfortable seats. They will see a miserable story and then go home as if they didn’t see anything and feel that they are very nice and very good, because in that part of the world, people are miserable. I really hate all these miserable feelings. That makes the spectator feel, “Oh, I have compassion.” I don’t like compassion. And I don’t like passivity.
I like spectators who question themselves when they watch the film. They are confused if they should like him or not. I like all this, because I think life is like this. So I didn’t think of the spectator. After, when I was editing the film, I felt that I wanted to be honest to the process. Whatever I felt at that moment, with Miguel, I tried to put it [in the film]. If I was confused or angry, or I feel he’s lying, or I want to hug him, I felt that I have to [put this in the film]. The viewer, maybe will feel the same.
7R: Why did you decide that you wanted animated scenes in the film?
Eliane Raheb: From the beginning, I knew that I would use animation, because I felt that one of the layers of Miguel is a layer of the fantasy, taboo, nightmares, and dreams. This would be difficult [to convey through live action]. I don’t want him only to talk, talk, talk in the film. I want to show what’s in his head. I felt that the best way to portray this layer of baroque fantasy would be through animation.
The budget did not allow us to shoot more in Spain. So the parts of his life [as an out gay man], as he lived it, in a very debaucherous way, I didn’t find the images for it. I had to use this animation to show this extravagant life he had in the ‘80s in Spain. This was not planned.
And why this 2D, stop-motion collage? It’s because I felt that this is the closest style that would resemble somebody trying to bring back memory. When you try to remember things, you remember them fragmented. You remember something from here and something from there.
7R: Why did you include the audition scenes in the film, where you and Miguel cast actors to play people from his past? I’ve seen a similar casting conceit before, but never in this way.
Eliane Raheb: The people from his past don’t exist anymore. I just found Tony [an unrequited love of Miguel’s whom he fought alongside in the war]. All the rest, they don’t exist. Either they’re dead, or they are like ghosts. I don’t know what happened to them.
It’s not important to find the best actor for that role, because I’m not doing a fiction film. I would cast many people, and I would take from everyone something that would resemble Miguel’s [past]. Some of those people we cast would turn into animation. I did not want them to turn into fiction reenactment, like, “We are now in a fiction [film].” They would turn into animated persons or just impressions of characters.
It was funny to see Miguel interacting [with the actors], because he is a person who likes to perform, but he did not become a performer. It was a way for me to see him trying to act, the same way he did when he told me his story [when we first met] in Barcelona.
The people [in the auditions] did not know who this guy [Miguel] was. They were confused, like, “Who is this guy, and who is the director? Is she or he the director? And why is he coming to the stage?” So it created a reality of confusion, of [questioning], is this fake? Is it true?
Sometimes, there are sad parts, and very violent parts, but I also wanted the film to be entertaining. Miguel is an entertaining person. He can cry and laugh at the same time. He could think, “I am miserable; I had a miserable life,” and cry, but he did not. It was a way for him to survive, to be laughing and to be entertaining.
I wanted the film to be entertaining, because I hate misery in films, where we are talking about a miserable thing and we are choosing to make the spectator feel miserable. I don’t like this. I like to at least be funny and entertaining.
7R: What did you put in the casting brief to find those actors? How much did you tell them about the project?
Eliane Raheb: Nothing.
7R: What did they think they were auditioning for?
Eliane Raheb: They would sometimes discover very, very [limited pieces of information, like], I’m searching for fighters, or for boys who are thirty-five years old and who are willing to play a tough man. Even the ladies, they knew afterwards that they were trying to play [Miguel’s] mother.
Even my mother, when she came to the casting, she didn’t understand what she was coming for. But she was very happy!
7R: How did you decide to put your mother in the film?
Eliane Raheb: I always felt a connection [between my story and Miguel’s]. With Miguel, I really went to search for Paquita [a Spanish woman who is Raheb’s father’s ex-lover]. [Early in the process], we went to Madrid, and we went to search for Paquita. So that became part of that story, as well, as we did not find her. Of course, during our search, he would tell me other stories. His story and my story became linked.
When I was shooting in Lebanon the second time, I became aware that this film is very personal for me. I wanted to shoot that link. And I would see in the editing, if I would use it or not. I was aware that maybe I will throw this [out] in the editing. I found that it was funny and nice to put it in the film.
It was also an honest way to expose a part of myself. I’m sure that the spectator in the beginning thinks, “Why is this filmmaker so involved in the film? It’s not about her! Why is she fighting with him? Why is she sometimes aggressive?” They will not feel at ease with me. At the end, they will think, “Ah, okay, we now know that she has — not a similar story, because the story is extreme, but patterns which we all live in Lebanon.”
It’s how family, religion, and politics mess with your life if you are not a conventional person and your identity is not a mainstream one. In that sense, I feel queer. Queer is not sexual only for me. Queer is political: when you do not fit in all the stereotypes and all the mainstream identities that everyone prays for. I wanted the Miguel story to mirror queer identity in a big, wide sense. This is why also putting my story in the film, even if it’s a little part, makes me and him alike, even if, sometimes, I was aggressive [toward] him. He is my ally. We are alike, and we were doing this together. I was violent with him because I am also a product of the Civil War. I am a product of that violence. So it’s in my personality, and I will not hide it.
7R: There are a lot of moments in the film that you keep in that are usually cut out of documentaries, like asking Miguel for consent to shoot, asking him what questions you can and can’t ask, and the moments in the film when he calls cut. You reveal the process of making the film within the film itself. Why was that important for you to do?
Eliane Raheb: Because that was part of the process. There’s nothing called truth in documentaries. It’s a big lie to say documentary is truth. And it’s a big lie for me to put the narration of Miguel from the beginning to the end as a voiceover just to make it flow. I wanted to show the fragility of doing a film with somebody who is controversial, who had traumas, and who cannot tell his story in an easy way. I wanted to show this, and I wanted to be honest with the process itself. This is why I left in all these parts of filmmaking, of the team, of him not able to continue, and involving him in the filmmaking itself.
Usually, it’s a director who says cut; it’s not the character who says cut. But I’m giving him the power to say cut when he does not feel that he wants to continue. I wanted to involve him in that process of telling his story. I feel that it’s really a film for him, also. This is why, at the end, I ask him [on camera], where do you think this film should end?
7R: There are four title cards in the film that break it up: “Michel”, “Miguel”, “Barcelona”, and “Love, Only Love”. How did you decide on that four-part structure?
Eliane Raheb: It’s a part of what I was telling you, that [the film] feels like a novel. So it needed chapters. Even if, inside the chapters, we are not just talking about [just] one thing or one theme. It’s a chapter for an identity, like the identity of Michel and the identity of Miguel. And the third one, the identity of Barcelona, because I feel that Miguel has three identities: the identity of the traumatized in Lebanon; the identity of Miguel Alonzo, who became totally libertine, doing all the craziest things he had not done in Lebanon; and then Miguel in Barcelona today, who’s trying to rebuild himself. He is aging, and he is trying to deal with existential questions.
This fourth part was about love. Can we find love, and what is love? So [finishing off] everything we built in the film, which has to do with love: love of the parents, love of Tony, the ultimate love, the big love, does it exist or not? And the church. [In the scenes in the church in chapter four], I give him the power to be the guy whose feet we kiss [when his feet are literally kissed in the church]. It’s not the opposite. He’s not the humiliated one. I give him his pride again, in the place that told him that he was the wrong person, a guy who had the devil in his soul.
We did not have the chance, in Lebanon, to be spiritual. The religious institutions kill your spirituality and make you afraid of religion or just to use it for political things. So we tend to lose spirituality. I think that Miguel is a spiritual person, although he denied it. He had this big wound because of the church. I wanted to also give him this key, that maybe he should reconcile with his spirituality.
7R: What are you working on next?
Eliane Raheb: I don’t know. I just finished, and I am happy that I finished. It was really a long journey, so now I’m just drained. I just finished the film and uploaded it three days before the festival. I applied with a work in progress, and when I knew that I was accepted, I did the last sprint.
Now, I just came to the mountains to be in nature, because I was suffocating in Beirut, in the sound mix with the mask. I was really intoxicated for the last two weeks. I was wearing masks in the studio for hours and hours, it was really traumatizing for me, more than the civil war. (laughs) Well, no, no.
7R: Now that you mention it, I would like to ask about sound. What was your approach to the sound design?
Eliane Raheb: I wanted to have a very colourful film, not only in the image, but also in the sound. There are the songs that Miguel sings, which are opera. And there is the sound that comes from the street. And there is the animation sound design, which are experimental sounds. It’s sounds which are weird and would make you enter into a weird world.
There is the Arabic song, “I Love the Sea” (“Ana Be’shak al Bahr”) that I put in the film whenever I [wanted to show] love, or to tell Miguel that I love him. Whenever I felt that I was really tough on him, I wanted him to understand that I love him, even if I was tough. And the viewer would feel something nice at this moment, of this fragile lady singing a song for the sea.
In the beginning [of the film], there’s lots of sounds, but it becomes much more simple, towards the end. It becomes much more basic sound[-wise] because as Maria, [Miguel’s] friend [who appears in the film], describes him, he was restless. He couldn’t bear being lonely or alone, or just hearing himself. He always wanted to be surrounded by sounds, just to feel that he’s not alone. In the end, I think the film shows that he’s becoming more calm. The sound becomes much more disciplined, more basic, and less complicated than the beginning.
7R: Do you think that the process of making the film was therapeutic for him? Do you think it’s changed the way he thinks about his life?
Eliane Raheb: Yeah, I think that it was a catharsis for him. I mean, he said it, it’s not like [only] I am saying it. As a filmmaker, I try to create the space for catharsis.
I know that, from the time I met Miguel in 2014 to today, he changed a lot. He’s less impulsive. I think he’s reconciling with everything and trying to find meaning for what he did. He’s accepting himself, accepting his roots, and accepting that he might find something nicer in the future.
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Han Shuai’s feature debut, Summer Blur, follows thirteen-year-old Guo in a hot summer in Wuhan where everyone seems to be exploiting women.
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The first time we see Guo (Huang Tian) in Han Shuai’s feature debut, Summer Blur, she’s in bed with her phone, because the closest relationship she has in the film is with her mother’s voicemail. Soon, her younger cousin, with whom she shares a bed, invades the frame with her arm, which Guo pushes away. It’s a reminder of how, even in sleep, Guo has no space of her own. Set over the course of a blazing hot summer in Wuhan, Summer Blur is the story of Guo realising how little she, as a working-class girl, is valued in the world — by her family and beyond — and how pervasive misogyny is: everyone is out to exploit her and other women. Even her home is not her own, having been sent to live with her aunt and uncle because her mother, a former model, is too busy living her life in Shanghai to take care of Guo — or even answer her phone calls.
Nobody in the film is kind to Guo unless they are expecting something in return. As lonely as she may be, what she wants most is to be left alone, at peace. On the last day of school, the boy crushing on her, Zhao (Zhang Xinyuan), removes the valve from her bike wheel, hoping she’ll have to rely on him for a ride home. Instead, another boy, Xiaoman (Luo Feiyang) swoops in with his scooter, but Guo only reluctantly accepts his rescue. Sitting on the back of his bike, and framed in a two-shot, there’s nothing romantic about the image, shot from afar and below, with Guo avoiding touching her driver at all costs. He offers her a thoughtful gift of a toy plane, but when she realises he hopes to be a kind of “sugar daddy” toward her, she deliberately destroys it, and his attempt to rescue the plane from the middle of a river will cost him his life.
Guo thus spends the summer feeling guilty that daring to have a reasonable emotional response to Xiaoman’s predatory behaviour may have had unexpected consequences. She’s too young to understand that she has no control over his signs of affection or acts of purported chivalry. From early on, Zhao discovers her connection to Xioman’s death, and offers both companionship and something a bit creepier. Does Zhao genuinely like her or is he hoping for something more, something she may not be interested in giving him? Guo herself isn’t sure how she feels about him, inviting him into her home one day, helping him with his business the next day, and later, feeling threatened by his slow and possibly predatory approach from across the room in an abandoned building.
Hewing close to Guo’s perspective throughout, Han follows Guo observing the world around her: the power dynamics between men and women, and the way men bestow their gaze and women cater to it. She presents as a tomboy at first, pairing large t-shirts with shorts, but can’t look away from the girls her age putting on makeup, or the lingerie that Zhao helps his father sell. At the same time, she defines herself against her spoiled, self-absorbed younger cousin who prefers tutus and ballet. When an ice cream merchant offers Guo and her cousin free dessert in exchange for her cousin, dressed in her ballet clothing, doing the splits, Guo looks on with skepticism bordering on disgust; she feels her cousin is being exploited. Despite getting only harsh words and sometimes hard slaps from her aunt, Guo still sticks up for her aunt when she sees her being condescended to and exploited by men.
Feeling powerless, Guo is torn between using her womanly appearance to get ahead, in the way her mother did as a model, and hating herself for allowing herself to be exploited. She looks at all men with skepticism, registering even the smallest acts of purported kindness as possible exploitation. Han gives credence to Guo’s point of view by making even Zhao, a seemingly harmless fellow thirteen-year-old, a potential threat. Han often shoots him stalking across the frame or an expanse of space toward Guo as a predator, and we first meet him in an act of predatory behaviour, albeit mild. It’s one of the only films I’ve ever seen that charts a young girl’s realisation of just how misogynistic the world is, as we watch her register every micro-aggression, and navigate how she can exist within it.
Young actress Huang Tian is a great discovery, portraying the often silent Guo as someone always thinking, always sizing up the situation. She also communicates Guo’s trauma — abandoned by her mother, unnurtured by her aunt and uncle, bullied by her cousin, and finally, her feelings of guilt over Xioman’s death. She’s in constant conflict, trying to figure out how to gain independence without losing herself. We watch on tenterhooks, hoping she’ll find a way forward.
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In Maria Schrader’s Berlinale film I’m Your Man, a cuneiform researcher is torn between her ethics and the appeal of a robot lover who meets all her needs.
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How big is the gulf between what we think we want from romantic relationships and what we actually need or would settle for? Is part of the joy of a relationship the knowledge that you’re needed? Is a flawed partner more attractive because they make you feel less alone for also being flawed? How do we change to suit our partners in a relationship? Wouldn’t it be convenient if you could store your partner in the spare room with the vacuum cleaner and the exercise bike? These are some of the many complex questions at the centre of Maria Schrader’s Berlinale competition film, I’m Your Man. In the film, cuneiform researcher Alma (Maren Eggert) is asked to test out a new AI robot, Tom (Dan Stevens), who has been designed to be her perfect man. For three weeks, he’ll live with her and learn from her, and at the end, she’ll write a report about the experience, evaluating what he’s like as a partner.
When the film opens, Alma arrives at a swanky club with retro decor, a dance floor, and “Puttin’ on the Ritz” in the background. Couples are flirting and chatting, either seated at tables or dancing. Guided by an employee of the establishment dressed like an old-timey flight attendant (Sandra Hüller), Alma is introduced to Tom, seated at a table, looking dapper in a well-tailored suit. The conversation is stilted. He makes bizarre comments like, “Your eyes are like mountain lakes I want to sink into,” and punctuates his suggestion that they dance the rumba with a shake of his shoulders. Alma asks him a series of bizarre but super specific questions, from solving a hard arithmetic problem to reciting poetry, which he answers without skipping a beat. Alma shifts between staring blankly at him and looking away in disbelief, disgust, or frustration. When they get on the dance floor, his dancing is so overenthusiastic, each movement exaggerated, that you wonder what planet he dropped in from. That is, until he short circuits, repeating “Ich bin” with a twist of his head, like a broken record. As he’s carried off by a group of handlers dressed like Hüller, we realise Alma’s date is not a human, but a facsimile of one.
Aside from Alma’s repeated comments about Tom being a machine, this opening scene is the only obvious sign that he is one. The world of Berlin looks like 2021. But the mix of old and new architecture — the all-white interior of the AI company, the Pergamom’s modern wing against its original building — much like the design of the club at the beginning, brings a sense of old and new together. The modernist pedestrian bridge outside of the Pergmamom, where a particularly tense scene unfolds, looks like it could be straight out of a science fiction film. The costumes, too, are contemporary but classic, much like the ones in Transit. Tom seems like a human, and this world seems just like ours. But the clash between modernity and antiquity — including the fact that Alma studies the latter — is constantly at the forefront of our minds. It’s as if Schrader is asking, is Tom all that different from the partners we know now?
The artificiality of Tom is particularly obvious in the difference between his physicality and Alma’s. In every situation, Tom moves at the same pace, sits and stands perfectly upright, and tends to move at right angles rather than fluidly; he turns with his whole body rather than turning just at the hips. The one time we see him settle into a couch with his arms spread wide, he does so stiltedly, moving into a seemingly relaxed position without ever releasing the tension in his body: he’s meant to look slouched, but doesn’t actually slump into it. Even Alma looks at this attempt with disdain. In other words, his body isn’t expressive, because he doesn’t feel emotions.
By contrast, Alma’s movements and body position are constantly expressive and constantly shifting. Walking to work, she’s purposeful and quick, upright but not stiff. When she gets bad news she needs to verify, she suddenly rushes through her office to her computer — the camera following fluidly with her — in a panic. Unwinding at a bar, or trying to, she’s completely slouched and languid. When talking playfully with a child, she slows down, and raises the pitch of her voice, making herself friendly. Alma’s changing body language feels so natural that it makes Tom’s unchanging stiltedness stand out. Their costumes also highlight their differences: Alma wears a billowing beige overcoat while Tom’s black coat is highly tailored and hews close to his body. Alma’s curly hair is unpredictable, while Tom’s straight crew cut never has a strand amiss.
In the beginning, Alma is turned off by Tom’s eager-to-please demeanour; his factory settings seem to have programmed him to perform old-fashioned ideas of chivalry where the gesture is grand but empty. On their first morning together, Tom laments she’s leaving without breakfast with a smile on his face and the overly formal, “I was so looking forward to a romantic little brunch. Have a little chat.” Without skipping a beat, Alma disdainfully replies, “I never chat.” Immediately, Tom replies, “That’s why I love you.” She looks at him skeptically, not believing a word he’s saying, and not just because she knows he’s a robot. She decides to lay down the ground rules, explaining she doesn’t want a partner, and he should just leave her alone. Stepping invasively into her personal space, he looks for specifics. “Love doesn’t interest you at all?” “Zero interest.” “And tenderness? Intimate closeness? Intense eye-contact?” “Definitely not.” In one early scene, Alma is on her balcony smoking, and through the window, we see Tom moving about the apartment, in the other half of the frame; Alma has done everything she can to keep them in separate spaces while sharing the space of her apartment.
Tom’s algorithm updates. He may be a blank slate, but he can read Alma, who is constantly expressive with her face, her body, and her voice. He learns from her dry humour, and when they go to a party together, tries a version of it on a friend of hers. He learns that drawing her a bubble bath next to a bed of rose petals — he explains that 93% of German women desire this — is the opposite of what she’s looking for. When she tries to provoke him into having an emotion and doing something unexpected, she suddenly finds him turning her down for sex. As Alma gets used to having Tom constantly by her side — she’s afraid to leave him alone in her apartment lest he try to tidy it up into something unrecognizable, like he did on day one — he adjusts and shifts until he becomes a better partner for her. Before long, he’s persuading her to do things she wants to do but doesn’t know she wants. His physicality, however, doesn’t change.
Just as she’s starting to like Tom, she reminds him, “There’s a gulf between us. We can’t pretend it doesn’t exist, pretend the illusion is just another form of reality, but certain things highlight just how deep and insurmountable that gulf is.” She’s constantly feeling emotions, and he has none. She has a past and regrets, and he’s eager like a child, even if he’s good at listening to what she says and paraphrasing it. “You won’t allow yourself to become close to a machine out of desperation and longing for human contact,” he says in reply to her story about her childhood that she means as a metaphor. She has sex with him that night anyway.
The trouble is, in so many ways, he’s exactly what she wants from a partner. He’s a success with her friends when they go to a party. Whether they know he’s a robot or not, they scrutinize him like an object while looking at and talking to her. To them, he’s an extension of her. He has no original ideas, but he’s got encyclopedic knowledge and is infinitely fascinated by her ideas. He can get up-to-date on research within minutes and help her find resources she didn’t know she needed. He’s a mirror. As Margaret Atwood wrote in “Tricks with Mirrors”:
Mirrors are the perfect lovers, that's it, carry me up the stairs by the edges, don't drop me, that would be back luck, throw me on the bed reflecting side up, fall into me, it will be your own mouth you hit, firm and glassy, your own eyes you find you are up against closed closed
It’s why Schrader so often shoots Alma through windows and frames, scrutinizing herself in front of a mirror.
Alma is never sure if she likes this mirror, even if it’s flattering. Because the more flattered she becomes, the more she likes him. The more she likes him, she wants to show her care. But what’s the point when Tom needs nothing and can’t experience emotions? “I’m acting in a play. But there’s no audience,” she tells him. “All the seats are empty. I’m not even acting for you. I’m all alone. I’m only acting for myself. Even right now, I’m only talking to myself. It’s not a dialogue.” And yet, pushing him away brings her to tears. Aren’t all relationships a play between two people, where you tell yourself stories about who you are and what you mean to each other? Tom invents a shared history between them: the story of how they met. But he has no pain he can share, and no way to empathize with her, only the appearance of it. Is that enough?
Atwood’s poem is about how men tend to treat women like mirrors: someone without needs and desires who lives to serve as the perfect partner. As a woman, Alma isn’t used to being on the other side of this. She’s surprised when she meets another man her age who is so happy with his robot that he wants to keep her forever. He’s unperturbed by her surface-level engagement because it’s exactly what Atwood suggests men tend to look for — and she looks younger and is hotter than anyone he feels he deserves.
Things are more complicated for Alma. One of the ways we show empathy is through mirroring: repeating back what people say to us in our own words. It’s how we communicate we understand them. Tom can do this better than most people, and he’s never selfish because he’s incapable of being so. But what if your partner’s selfishness is how you know they’re real? Is it possible for Alma to trick herself into really believing Tom can empathize with her and care for her when she knows his words are empty? How willing is she to ignore that she knows this if she can get some comfort from it? Aren’t we constantly ignoring inconvenient bits of reality anyway in the service of happy relationships?
By presenting us with a vivid, complicated, and funny woman, Schrader dares us to ask whether Alma should take Tom or if she deserves more? Is there a man who deserves her, anyway? Her ex-partner, with whom she shares a strong history and rapport, fell quickly into bed and a new life with someone else shortly after they broke up, with seemingly no regrets. Alma hates herself for loving Tom, because it feels like falling for herself. He can’t challenge her as she thinks she wants to be challenged, but Schrader never introduces us to someone who can. And Alma has all but given up. Alma may be using Tom to dialogue with herself, but Schrader asks, how different does this look from most romantic relationships?
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While Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire was about a pair of lovers whose romance had an expiration date, her new Berlinale film, Petite Maman, is about how everything has an expiration date.
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In Céline Sciamma’s fifth feature, Petite Maman, getting to know your mother is like chasing after a ghost. Parents are elusive, in life and death, living in an adult world that, as a child, you only ever get to visit. The disconnect between parent and child is in the constantly moving camera of the opening scene, which follows eight-year-old Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) as she says goodbye to the many women in the hospital where her grandmother recently died, chasing the goodbye she didn’t get to have with her own grandmother. And in the first moment of stillness, when Nelly’s mother, Marion (Nina Meurisse), looks out the window of her mother’s room, at the grass and trees below, exhaustedly resting on a table, as if she might find her mother outside. As the camera pulls back, we feel the weight of Marion’s grief — and Nelly’s absence from the frame. They’re both experiencing loss, but it’s not quite a joint experience. Mother and daughter are moving at different speeds, in different rhythms. The camera reveals Nelly’s perspective, watching from behind, aware of her mother’s slumped physique, but unable to reach it.
Leaving the hospital, Nelly, Marion, and Nelly’s father (Stéphane Varupenne) head to Nelly’s grandmother’s house to pack it up and close out that chapter of their lives. The house feels haunted with secrets, the furniture covered with sheets, the contents of the home unknown to Nelly, as the hallways are shrouded in shadows. Like the house in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, it’s a former home for the protagonist’s obsession — be it love interest or parent — and a new place for the protagonist. It’s also a ghost of its former self. The only rooms Marianne (Noémie Merlant) enters in Portrait of a Lady on Fire are her own and the kitchen — both devoid of memories — while for Nelly, it’s the house that represents a time in her mother’s life — childhood — now lost, and the home of someone — her grandmother — now entirely gone.
The house unfolds its secrets slowly. The sheets gradually come off the furniture, and the treasures stored within are discovered. On the first night, Nelly watches her mother sort through childhood possessions, like books and school notebooks. She discovers her mother could draw but couldn’t spell. In the coming days, she’ll discover a hidden closet in the wall, more bits and bobs from her mother’s childhood, and other places that hold memories for her mother now lost to time and age.
At bedtime on the second day, Nelly eagerly asks her mother for stories of her mother’s childhood, and her mother remarks, “You always ask questions at bedtime!” “That’s when I see you,” Nelly replies, as if dreading her mother’s quick departure, who shortly steps out of frame after a kiss goodnight. Unexpectedly, her mother soon returns and climbs into bed, seated, with Nelly. But dressed in her day clothes — jeans and a mock-neck red sweater — she still feels out of place. It’s only a matter of time before she leaves.
Throughout most of the film, cinematographer Claire Mathon keeps the camera at Nelly’s eye level, which means her parents tend to appear as legs or stomachs in the frame with her. They need to deliberately bend down to share her space. Mostly, they’re in separate frames, unless either Nelly or one of her parents invade each other’s spaces. In the car, on the way to her grandmother’s house from the hospital, from the backseat, Nelly repeatedly invades her mother’s frame from behind, pushing in to feed her cheetos three times and then offering a juice box, before coming in for a hug around the neck. It’s loving and comforting and yet also suggests a longing to be with her mom, who is separate in the driver’s seat. The closest they come to being at the same level is when Nelly finds her mother on the couch sleeping, and climbs into bed with her. They chat briefly, but even still, Sciamma positions them at right angles: Marion on her side looking down at Nelly, who now is only at a slightly lower level.
In the morning, Nelly’s mother has disappeared without notice, leaving Nelly and her father to do the packing for two or three more days. They discover a solo toy with a ball that Nelly takes outside to play with. When Nelly loses the ball to the forest just beyond, her quest to find it transports her into a semi-magical world. The transition is subtle: the elevated sounds of the leaves rustling and even thunder coming as Nelly crosses an invisible threshold gives a sense of heightened reality. In the forest, she discovers a girl her age who looks just like her (played by Joséphine Sanz’s identical twin sister, Gabrielle Sanz), building a fort like the one her mother told her about making herself as a child. The girl, Marion, enlists Nelly’s help to carry a large log to her destination, and they begin a tentative friendship.
As it starts to pour, Nelly follows Marion home, to a house, glimpsed first in a still shot that Nelly and Marion must enter. As they go through the open gate, turn the corner at the back of the house, and slam the door shut, something has shifted. The house looks just like Nelly’s grandmother’s house, with the same hidden closet, and the same layout, only here, it’s full of objects and life. As they towel off the water with identical towels, stripping off their wet sweaters — Marion’s is red, like Nelly’s mother’s — they both end up in white shirts, with Marion in a turtleneck, again mirroring the style of Nelly’s mother’s sweater from the opening.
“Secrets aren’t always things we try to hide. There’s just no one to tell them to,” says Marion, in character, while playing dress up with Nelly. It’s a statement that resonates with the secrets that are kept between parent and child — not deliberate, but because the child simply wasn’t there when the parent was younger, when the secret was new and could be told. After all, Nelly describes her parents’ childhood to her father as “a secret,” though he insists it’s not been one intentionally. They’re always telling stories to Nelly, but ones Nelly finds inadequate for really understanding her parents. She complains that they’re “just little stories: Christmas presents you had, or if you loved pizza. I don’t know the real stuff. Things that scared you, say.”
As Nelly and Marion’s friendship develops, we begin to suspect, along with Nelly, that Marion is the younger version of Nelly’s mother. Instead of hearing about her mother’s childhood in drips and drabs, through fragmented stories, she suddenly gets to experience what it’s like — something her mother probably no longer remembers fully. She may remember loving hot cocoa, but not making mountains out of cocoa; she may remember cooking crepes, but not the flip that landed the crepe on the dish rack; she may remember the fort, but not the hard work of dragging all the logs to make it. In this magical past, Nelly gets to experience it first-hand, not simply trailing after the younger Marion, as she often does, but in a two-shot with her, sharing the load. Unlike adult Marion, eight-year-old Marion needs Nelly and has time and energy to play with her.
But Nelly will only be at her grandmother’s house for two or three days, and indeed, they finish early and almost leave a day early. When Marion invites Nelly over for a sleepover on the last night, her father suggests, “Another time?”. But Nelly understands that life is fleeting, and this moment with her past mother is fleeting, too: “There won’t be another time,” she explains. So they stay. And in that one evening, Nelly and Marion celebrate Marion’s birthday, make crepes, and have a grand time. Nelly also reveals to Marion her suspicions about their connection. They both know, as do we, that the next day, they’ll have to say goodbye. In the meantime, they enjoy being on level footing. In the process, the young Marion gives Nelly an enormous gift by explaining something her older self never has: “You didn’t invent my sadness.”
While Portrait of a Lady on Fire was about a pair of lovers whose romance had an expiration date, Petite Maman is about how everything has an expiration date. We’re constantly saying goodbye — to moments, to places, to stages of life, and to people, even before they die. Early in the film, Nelly laments not getting to say a good ‘goodbye’ to her grandmother because she didn’t know it would be the last one. Her sort-of time travel grants her the opportunity to be with her grandmother again, and with her mother in a way she could never in the present tense. On her birthday, Marion, now nine, about the blow out the candles, changes her mind and insists that her mother and Nelly sing happy birthday a second time — as if trying to make this moment last longer.
In our 2020 ebook on Sciamma’s work, Portraits of resistance: The cinema of Céline Sciamma, I wrote an essay about Sciamma’s temporary utopias: how she grants her characters these perfect, but fleeting, moments of time in an often difficult world. Like Portrait, which depicts a temporary utopia between two lovers freed from the strictures of society and patriarchy, most of Petite Maman is also about a temporary utopia, in which the ending is written in stone from the beginning. In Portrait, the lovers get to know each other inside out, their bodies and minds. In Petite Maman, Nelly gets to know a part of her mother otherwise locked away from her, if for no other reason than time and place.
Nelly and Marion can meet in this temporary magical world, but only for three days, and Nelly insists on having the third day that was promised to her. The girls are too young to be too preoccupied with goodbyes, especially as they know they’ll meet again in another form. And yet, you could read these three days as Marion’s goodbye to her own mother, having disappeared as an adult so she could reappear as a child and connect with her mother for one last time — and with her daughter in a way she didn’t know how as an adult.
If Petite Maman is also a portrait of resistance, Nelly is resisting the goodbyes she knows she’ll have to make. She says the goodbyes she can — to the other patients, all older women whom we could mistake for her grandmother — when denied the goodbyes she wished she had. She seizes not only the opportunity to get to know her mother as a young person, but learns that she has to seize the day, because you never know when you’ll be saying goodbye for the last time.
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Before Petite Maman premiered at the 2021 Berlinale, Céline Sciamma made four features, which we explore in depth through essays and interviews.
Cree filmmaker Danis Goulet discusses her feature debut Night Raiders, which looks at motherhood and the horrors of residential schools through a sci-fi lens.
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The logline for Cree filmmaker Danis Goulet’s sci-fi feature debut, Night Raiders, sounds eerily familiar: “In a post-apocalyptic future, children are considered state property. Separated from their parents, they are trained in boarding schools to fight for the regime.” Is it sci-fi or the history of how Canada has treated Indigenous People? To paraphrase Mi’kmaw filmmaker Jeff Barnaby, the apocalypse already happened for Indigenous People.
While Barnaby’s genre-crossing Rhymes for Young Ghouls looked at the horrors of residential schools — the schools that Indigenous children in Canada were sent to after being torn from their parents — from the perspective of a teenager determined to avoid going to one, Goulet uses sci-fi to look at this from the perspective of a mother forced to give up her child. In Night Raiders, Goulet crafts a poverty-stricken world of the near-future where surveillance drones are everywhere, a militaristic police force is under constant patrol, and nowhere is safe. Here, all children — not just Indigenous children — are permanently separated from their parents and sent to “academies,” that look like prisons, for schooling that seems synonymous with military training. That also means that the multicultural, multi-racial ‘student’ body looks like the film’s audience, which makes the school pledge, “One nation, one language,” particularly creepy. Ironically, the absolutely horrifying “academies” still seem almost paradisal compared to Canada’s residential schools.
“When there’s something you really want to say, you can hit it in almost a harder way in genre because you’re not constrained by reality,” Goulet told me. “I think you can counter skepticism when you’re dealing with real history.” In Night Raiders, Goulet replaces Canada’s RCMP (or “Mounties”), an international symbol of friendly and adorable police, with what they were really designed to do: hold militaristic power over vulnerable (in real life, Indigenous) people, using violence without a second thought, in an attempt at cultural genocide. The move to sci-fi also allows Goulet to tell a more contemporary story of Indigeneity, inspired by Standing Rock and Idle No More, in which Indigenous People around the world are uniting against global colonialism, and young people are changing the world. That ethos dovetails nicely with the story behind the film, which is an Indigenous co-production between Canada and New Zealand.
The multihyphenate Elle Máijá-Tailfeathers (who played the last woman standing in Barnaby’s post-apocalyptic zombie film, Blood Quantum, and whose feature The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open screened at Berlinale in 2019) stars as Niska, a Cree woman with experience living on the land, fighting to protect her daughter from being sent to an ‘academy’ since this would guarantee their permanent separation. After years spent avoiding the police and living in the bush, her twelve-year-old daughter, Waseese (Brooklyn Letexier-Hart), gets a bad wound that becomes infected. Without access to medicine or medical care, Niska is forced to give up Waseese to the authorities in order to save her life. Little does she know that the ‘academies’ aren’t actually the world-class educational institutions that the government’s propaganda, as seen on screens around the town, claims it to be.
As Niska deals with guilt for not being able to protect her daughter, she’s torn between trying to find a better life for herself by moving to the country her daughter would be patrolling after graduation — which means getting past the wall at the border — where she would be able to be reunited with her daughter on graduation, or rescuing her daughter now. That mission is complicated by a deadly virus that threatens to kill everyone where Niska was living, and an unexpected encounter with a group of Cree activists (helped by a Maori man and other Indigenous people) who inform Niska about the real dangers Waseese is facing.
For most of her life, Niska has been a loner; in recent years, living off the land in isolation with her daughter. It’s not a glamorous existence but a hard-won one, where there’s a constant risk of both being found and not having enough to eat. She’s smart and resourceful, always aware of her surroundings, and doing everything she can to protect her daughter. It’s not until she loses her daughter that she finds community among people who will help rescue Wasseese, in exchange for Niska’s promise to care for and lead the other children to safety. It’s also the first time that Niska is surrounded by Cree language speakers, as someone who has never been fluent. Among the chaos and hardship, she finds a home. This also means the film is packed full of a who’s who of Indigenous actors, including Violet Nelson (The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open) and the great Gail Maurice (Québexit, Trickster), who is also a Cree language speaker and a filmmaker.
With very little money, Goulet has crafted a dystopian universe that’s as convincing and brutal in its totalitarianism as The Hunger Games — with which it shares drones, a surveillance state, a failed Civil War, and a hope for the future embodied in young people. The similarities stop there, though, because Goulet has taken concepts from the Cree language and culture, and transformed them into sci-fi ideas. Unlike so many dystopian films, this isn’t centred around the suffering of children, but the suffering of parents who had no choice but to give up their children to suffering. It also means Niska is that rarest of action heroes: a mother who lives to protect her daughter, and young people, and who is thus crucial for the survival of her entire community. Goulet achieves much of the film’s impressive world-building through well-chosen locations (with help from production designer Zazu Myers) and incredible sound design that evokes the scary world we only glimpse pieces of.
Before the film’s world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival, I sat down with Goulet via Zoom to talk about the opportunities for Indigenous storytelling on film and in genre, specifically, the joys of world-building, and getting inspired by the Cree language and culture.
Seventh Row (7R): What was the genesis of Night Raiders?
Danis Goulet: I started working on Night Raiders back in 2013. It was around the same time that I was making a short film called Wakening, which was a monster movie about two classic Cree characters from oral stories placed in a near future, where North America was under occupation. It was my first time, as a filmmaker, moving into the genre space. Coming off of making observational, realist drama, it was just incredibly liberating to move into the genre space. So I started to write Night Raiders.
I was interested in genre as a way to talk about the impacts of colonisation on Indigenous People, which all of my work explores, in some way. Everything that has been written into the imaginary future of the film has already happened, and has to do specifically with policies that were inflicted upon Indigenous People throughout history.
I started to craft a story that was very focused around a young girl and her mother who are on the run. The story imagines a post-Civil War in North America, where children are property of the state. The mom and daughter are on the run trying to prevent her from being taken [by the state].
Of course, that was a direct allegory for the residential school system in Canada. I [was writing the script when] the Truth and Reconciliation Commission came out with their report saying that an Indigenous child had more chance of dying [by] going into a residential school than a Canadian soldier had going into World War II. I felt like this history isn’t talked about or explored enough. But also, sometimes, there can be a fatigue around these very heavy historical issues. For me, genre was incredibly exciting as a way into talking about these things.
Around the time I started writing it, I was really inspired by what youth were doing, both online and in activist movements. As a part of my research, I went to Standing Rock. That was an amazing experience that really informed my writing. I started writing right around the time that Idle No More was happening, which was an Indigenous activist movement. I found all of that very inspiring, and the youth especially: their courage, and their ability to be seen and heard in ways that were really exciting. All of those things were threads that wove into creating the story.
7R: In what way did you find genre liberating? What opportunities did it allow that aren’t there with a typical historical drama?
Danis Goulet: You’re not constrained by reality in quite the same way. When there’s something you really want to say, you can hit it in almost a harder way in genre because you’re not constrained by reality. I think you can counter skepticism when you’re dealing with real history.
People could have a perspective where maybe [the traumas inflicted on Indigenous People in history] wasn’t as bad as you’re making it out to be. But in genre, you can make it as bad as you want it to be. You can hit on truths in this incredibly truthful way.
To me, the story had to be driven by the emotional connection between the mother and daughter. But the genre elements are just so cool and exciting. It really allows you to come at this all in a very fresh way.
7R: Can you tell me about the choice to tell Night Raiders from the mother’s perspective, primarily? We tend to think about the horrors of experiencing residential schools and not the horrors of having to send your child there.
Danis Goulet: Maybe, by virtue of the fact that I’m a mother that was writing this, I [was thinking] about my own children and my relationship to them.
In my research, when I listened to some of the TRC [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] hearings, one of the things that was so striking to me was the shame that parents felt about having lost their children, and in some ways, thinking that it was their fault, when in fact, it was a systemic policy that was being forced upon them. Indigenous families had to send their children [to residential schools] by law. That happened to seven generations of Indigenous families.
It was very striking the way parents blamed themselves in spite of something that was, in fact, systemic that was happening to them. There was something about that emotional terrain that was just devastating. I think that really drew me to write about what parents experience because it’s so complex for them. They actually do feel responsible for their children. They feel like they didn’t protect them, and they didn’t do enough. All of that is so heart-wrenching.
7R: Is that something that genre helped? In Night Raiders, you don’t feel like there is any way that Niska could get around giving up her daughter. I wonder if you were telling this story in a more historical context, it might be harder for modern audiences to understand that you just didn’t have a choice.
Danis Goulet: Yeah. I think what this [genre] world allowed me to do was place all populations, not just Indigenous People, under these incredibly oppressive circumstances, so that they could imagine, for themselves, What if we lived in a world in which…? This is a poverty-stricken world, and there’s this charity effort of this far away oppressive force. Soldiers are everywhere, and they’re controlling all aspects of life.
There are still so many people in Canada that aren’t even aware of the past system where Indigenous People were constrained to reserves, and they needed a pass from the Indian Agent in order to leave, which is almost like a passport. These things are hard to imagine.
When you go into genre, you actually can just create the world, and then it is being imagined. And then, you ask people to imagine how it feels to live under those oppressive circumstances, where it’s a police state, and there are soldiers around at all times.
I also thought it was interesting to look at different regimes that present themselves in benevolent ways. It’s like, “We’re just here to help.” In Canada, we think of ourselves as such a polite country, and as a country that didn’t have any bad intentions, that was actually trying to help Indigenous People. Whereas from an Indigenous perspective, it’s like, “No, that was an attempted genocide.”
You can hit these points when you create an imaginary world. It opens up all the opportunities to set up all of the circumstances and then bring the characters into it.
The world-building part of it was really fun. The story doesn’t even take place that far into the future. All I did was write an imaginary North American political future going thirty years forward. I used every US election as a benchmark to imagine what would happen. I imagined a coalition of very far-right extremists with the middle-right taking over America, and then eventually, taking over Canada, and then eventually, there being a North-American-wide Civil War.
That actually came out of research I was doing about the rise of Hitler in the ‘30s. He was very extremist, but he was able to get elected by forming a coalition with folks that were more moderate. It creates this sort of perfect storm of leaders like him to rise. I had actually written that Hillary Clinton was gonna win. And then, it was the backlash to her election that would create this swell of far-right extremism. I just really didn’t imagine it would happen so quickly, the way we saw it.
I was also thinking about the changing demographics in North America, and thinking there’s going to be a white supremacist backlash. That’s always what happens when power is challenged. I started working with that idea and writing an imaginary history where a far-right extremist [government] takes over and starts a war.
7R: Can you tell me more about this research process for Night Raiders? In the press notes, it said you were doing consultations with elders and community members in both Canada and New Zealand. And you’ve just talked about researching Hitler, and watching TRC hearings.
Danis Goulet: This story is obviously told from a Cree and Métis perspective. I’m Cree and Métis, and I originally come from Saskatchewan. All of my films concern things to do with my culture, in some way. As Indigenous People, we’re dealing with one-hundred years of misrepresentation on screen. We’re always trying to counter that. We want to try to do it in the right way.
That always means, culturally, getting the guidance of elders. I worked with my dad a lot, even in early development. He’s a Cree language speaker. We just talk conceptually about things. I’ll go home, sit at the kitchen table, and hit record on a device. I’ll start asking him about things in the language. Or I’ll take an idea, and I’ll talk about it. A lot of the research that I did with him formed some of the concepts and the ideas around some of the things that read in the film as sci-fi elements, but they’re really taken from Cree thought.
In a lot of genre movies, we see the trope of the AI that gains consciousness, and at the moment that happens, all is lost, because it’s going to come and kill us. I wanted to play with that trope, to really question whether or not that is a view of AI, or whether or not we might have some kind of respect for them as beings, if, in fact, that’s what they turn into. I just found that to be a really interesting question.
In the Cree language, the way things break down, there’s a categorization of animate and inanimate. In the language, rocks are animate. They’re talked about as having a life force. That was, conceptually, really interesting. When you think of what machines are made of, they’re made of the same minerals and rocks. It really played into this idea of AI consciousness, and whether or not we dare regard them as beings worthy of respect and even care. It’s just a different way into it and a way to subvert and play with that trope.
7R: It’s really wonderful that there are so many characters speaking Cree in the film. Can you tell me about that?
Danis Goulet: So much of that funnels through my dad because I’m not a Cree language speaker. We also worked with elder Pauline Shirt, who’s a really respected elder here in the Toronto Community. She actually does work with the ImagineNative Film and Media Arts Festival, among many others. She’s originally from out west, so she’s a Cree speaker, and her sister is a linguist. She brought all of this incredible knowledge and teachings to the film, as well.
This idea that is talked about in the film of a guardian, ogunuheneechigew. That was something that I talked about with my dad. He spoke about how, from a Cree values perspective, a person that was regarded as a guardian was someone that was tasked with looking after others. This care for others is really highly regarded. I thought that was interesting, especially in relation to children. Sometimes, in the Euro-Western lens, children are to be dismissed or brushed away. And I think there’s something really beautiful [in prizing the care of children].
We haven’t seen a lot of portrayals of women on screen that are tasked with looking after children, especially in an action movie type of way. It would probably be regarded as an unsexy task to go take a bunch of children to safety. My thinking about this was coming from the values that come from that concept in Cree, which is to look after others and how highly regarded that is. If you are one of those people, you are highly regarded for what you do in your care for others.
7R: You mentioned film as an extension of the oral tradition. How do you see it that way?
Danis Goulet: Film is an incredibly powerful vehicle for Indigenous storytelling. Indigenous stories are the original stories of this land. I grew up hearing them around the fire.
My dad talks about a story that he found out through another elder who he met in his travels, because he was trying to figure out why there was a name for the North in the Cree language, which is called kîwêhtin. It relates to the north wind. And he heard a story from an elder where he learned that it was actually in reference to the glacier. The glacier was in North America over 10,000 years ago. So it means that there’s a story passed down through people that references that. That is so beautiful and poetic, and it connects us — whether you’re Indigenous or not — to this land in a way that I think is potentially really powerful.
For me, growing up as a kid in Saskatchewan, I never knew you could have a job in film. I didn’t dream of that. But my family had a little camera just for family stuff — a little camcorder. I used to put it on my shoulder and film everything. What film can do, as both a visual and an audio medium, is so perfect, in my mind, for this kind of storytelling.
7R: Can you tell me about the sound in Night Raiders? It’s so important for world-building and is so evocative.
Danis Goulet: The sound was incredible. A lot of the sound folks were actually based down in New Zealand. We were this international co-production. By the time we got to that stage of the film, COVID had hit. We were editing, and then there was the shutdown, and then we were trying to remotely finish. But luckily, our sound folks were all down in New Zealand.
Our sound designer, Michelle Child, is incredible, and has worked on amazing films. I worked with her and her partner. There were also the composers, Moniker. They had worked on Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople. They’re incredible musicians that also work as film composers.
I did all of the sound work, with the exception of the mix which was brought back to Toronto, remotely with these incredibly talented folks. They understood how important sound was to create so much of the tension in the film. There are certain things where you really have to imagine what things will sound like in the future, and they brought a lot of really cool ideas.
We also brought in an Indigenous vocalist, Michelle St. John, who’s here in Toronto, and she’s an artist, a singer and also a filmmaker. We had her record a whole bunch of different sounds with her voice, and then we wove those sounds into the fabric of the sound design. It’s really subtle. You can’t tell it’s a voice. It just sounds like… it’s even hard to describe. I wanted something really evocative but that was also subtle. So I chose to work with an Indigenous artist to help add something that felt unique, especially to really important moments of the film where there’s communication happening. In those moments, it was important to have something really unique to punctuate that.
7R: How did you work with your production designer to create the world through all the sets in Night Raiders?
Danis Goulet: We shot all around Southern Ontario. We were based in Hamilton for a while where Niska’s apartment is. We found this beautiful cedar forest, close to Hamilton, for the camp scenes.
The production designer I was working with is Zazu Meyers [who also did Mouthpiece (2018), Paper Year (2018), and The Grizzlies (2018)], and she is just so incredible. She was so excited to start building and creating the world. She also worked so hard on the cultural piece, in conjunction with elders and other knowledge keepers, to try to do it in the right way.
So [Zazu], [the director of photography] Daniel Grant [who also shot The Rest of Us (2019) and Into the Forest (2015)], and I would go on location scouts, and we would start building the worlds in our mind. We would stand in a space, and we’re like, “Okay, this could go there. And this could go there.”
I’m a little bit of a VFX skeptic. I was so lucky to work with Park Road down in New Zealand because they’re such an incredible VFX team. They’re so world class. Some of the set extensions and things that they embellish with VFX — it’s so incredible to go through that process. I’d done some VFX work in my previous films, but this was a total treat to imagine how you embellish sets that already exist.
The film is a Canada-New Zealand co-production. What did that bring to the table? As Indigenous filmmakers, we’re a part of a global film community that meets all over the world at different film festivals. We’ve known each other for years. Very early in the development, I thought, what would it be like to have a Maori character as a part of the story? Would that be okay? Would it be strange?
So I took a very early draft of the script to my friend, Briar Grace-Smith, who’s an Indigenous screenwriter down in New Zealand. I had her read it, and I got her thoughts. She was really encouraging and felt that it made sense in the context of the story.
Later, when I went to Standing Rock, there was this one victory where they were able to stop the pipeline, when Obama was still president. There was this huge celebration in Standing Rock, and the first folks that were thanked on the live feed I was watching were the Maori delegation that had come up to stand in solidarity with the people up at Standing Rock.
There are so many ways in which we, as Indigenous People, stand in solidarity together, and we’re connected together. I wanted to express that in the film. Very organically, that meant that the idea of a co-production would be really exciting, if we could actually pull it off.
We started talking to people in New Zealand. I’d known Taika Waititi from years back from having shorts on the festival circuit at the same time. He also participated in an ImagineNative initiative back when I was involved with the festival. I asked him if he would be interested in coming on as an EP [Executive Producer], and he was.
An Indigenous co-production is such a natural extension of the many ties that we have already. So many people have been dreaming about making these things happen for many years. We were really thrilled to be the first international Indigenous co-production between the two countries.
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