After meeting producer and filmmaker, Orwa Nyrabia, at the 2nd Annual Cinéma Vérité Iran International Documentary Film Festival in Tehran in October, I re-met him and his partner, Diana El Jeiroudi (director of Dolls--A Woman from Damascus) at the DocPoint festival in Helsinki, Finland last week.
Nyrabia and El Jeiroudi are launching their second iteration of DOX BOX in March. The documentary festival and conference will take place in Damascus from the 4th - 11th; then, from the 12th - 15th the festival will travel to two other cities in Syria, Tartous and Homs. It's quite an ambitious undertaking and the two filmmakers have taken on the task of launching a major nonfiction festival in their homeland, something that's never been done before.
DOX BOX is an independent nonprofit creative documentary festival that was launched in February of '08. The festival is noncompetitive, with the sole prize, the Damascus Audience Award, decided by popular vote. The overriding directive is to show films with high cinematic standards and ambitions from around the world (the True/False of the Middle East!), with a focus on films that cover subjects relevant to the daily realities of the artists who craft them, focusing on works that are low or modestly budgeted, or self-funded with no "access privileges." They showcase a balance of work from both emerging and established artists, inviting the international documentary community to a venue where they can meet filmmakers from around the Arab world.
Shortly after meeting him in Tehran, I had a chance to interview Nyrabia about this nascent festival and the role that he and El Jeiroudi want to embody for the filmmakers and film-goers of Syria, an audience woefully underexposed to not only Western nonfiction cinema, but to Arab documentary, as well. We talked about this new initiative, the specific challenges they face and what continues to inspire him as an artist. Here's our discussion:
Still in Motion (SIM): What is your driving mission for DOX BOX and what need do you believe it fulfills for your film community there?
Orwa Nyrabia (ON): In the broader sense, its purpose is to bring the documentary, as a genre of cinematic artistic expression, to the Syrian audience. For more than three decades, we’ve had very limited access to anything but pirated copies of Hollywood, Bollywood and Cairo blockbusters. Moreover, our audience, in general, has only known the documentary as a form of informative, educational, didactic TV programming, with very few exceptions. Even most of our own Syrian creative documentaries are banned here; hence, only very few have seen them.
A direct mission of bringing the documentary to the spotlight in our country is to induce the habit that is largely missing here and that is the habit of self-critique. Poorer, under-privileged societies like ours tend to develop an illusive sense of self-praise, an act of denial, of making up for an inferiority that is unavoidable when you are poorer and less free. I believe that developing an appreciation of honest self-criticism is a crucial step towards real and profound progression. The good creative documentary can really help in that regard. So, I think “fulfillment” should not be an aim, nor is it a possibility. It is not about fulfilling; it is rather about hunger. It is an act of encouraging the audience, the society and the filmmakers, to acknowledge their own hunger. We think that filmmakers in Syria have had their fill of the country’s long-standing isolation. It is not easy to get connected to the world and to the good opportunities out there.
In addition to screening a selection of great films, DOX BOX 09 will offer local and regional filmmakers a chance to meet representatives from various international funding entities. We aim to put our region on their maps! DOX BOX will host an open day with international funders and festivals, where casual social and personal encounters will be possible for participating filmmakers. With their accreditation, they can meet the people who might be able to help them make their projects into actual films and have opportunities to be invited to show their films at other festivals. There won’t necessarily be an “industry” orientation [buyer and commissioner market], nor any broadcast buyers, not for a few years at least.
SIM: What is it about bringing community together through film that helps to raise our universal consciousness, in your opinion?
ON: It is probably the encounter with someone else’s vision, whether on an individual or collective level, that helps us grow better. It helps us, individually and collectively, to see more of our own selves in the mirror, to examine our own prejudices and self-images. This examination can possibly lead to better consciousness of the universe, of the “other.” An interviewer asked the great Frederick Wiseman what he thought of the films of Michael Moore. He said: “He is not interested in complexity.” That has always been a motto for me—not in an anti-Moore sense—but, generically. Why make films if not to emphasize the importance of complexity? We already know who the “bad guys” are. What is the point if the films we make are not a contribution to modern human life? We can’t just select films that offer direct self-satisfaction; we need to look for and watch films with complex, rich, personal and multi-faceted approaches to their subjects.
SIM: What defines your own sense of cultural identity?
ON: Ossama Mohammad, a wonderful Syrian filmmaker, and a mentor of mine, once wrote, “The more you say ‘our identity,’ the more I smell blood, blood of the others, around us.” Still, what might be special about our “cultural identity” is that we are poorer and less free, that we are agonized and insulted by these facts and so our current self-expression is aggressive when it needs to be less so, and more subtly cynical.
More personally, my cultural identity, as I think it is now, is informed from a mixture coming from many sources that I have encountered, from ancient Arab and Greek mythology. I spent my childhood amongst mythological heroes, and look where that leaves me today!
SIM: What is the cultural and social temperature in Syria in regard to nonfiction film?
ON: Films and filmmakers are still liked around here. Not as much as TV people are, because TV production has been very successful in Syria for two decades now with its stars and major productions. Cinema has been falling down for over three decades. It is typical here to say that took place because someone does not really want us to get together, that watching series at home, each one alone, has been chosen for us. Well, that is probably true.
SIM: What are you planning for 09 to encourage more of that "collectivity," if you will?
ON: We want to keep the spirit we started with for DOX BOX 08, very simple and low-key. Honestly, a major particularity of DOX BOX is that it relies mainly on international financing. There are no local funding opportunities, and even commercial sponsorship here is not working efficiently yet for such cultural nonprofit events. Only official patronage and some in-kind sponsorship can be expected from the authorities.
Having said that, we plan to have an International Panorama with approximately sixteen films from around the world, which are no older than four years, about half of which are to be Arab films. There will be two sidebar thematic selections of six films each, to be followed by open seminars with filmmakers and specialists. For 2009, these are going to be “Voices of Women,” films on women whose voices changed something in their own lives or in the lives of their communities, and “Notes on War,” films on individual experiences of war. There will also be a Meet the Master section, where 4-5 films by a world-renowned master documentary filmmaker are shown, followed by an open talk with him or her. Other components include a “Writing the Documentary” hands-on workshop, and the above-mentioned Open Day with Funds and Fests. There will also be a film critique workshop aimed at young female cultural journalists who aspire to cover film.
SIM: Personally, what films excite you--either classics or something more recent, and why? Who are the artists that constantly inspire you as an artist?
ON: Robert Kramer’s Route One/USA for its portrayal of the United States. A huge number of American films make one think your country is such a terribly uninteresting, fake and pretentious place. His film has an unforgettable sense of the poetic, the real, the personal. I love Viktor Kossakovsky’s The Belovs; it awakens the reasons why I dreamed of making films in the first place and contains unbearable lightness, beautiful patience and painful humor. Johan ven der Keken’s Amsterdam Global Village (1996) for its beautifully open structure and portrayal of how an author’s freedom can be expressed. James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments is a great example of one man’s cinematic accomplishment; it’s a very courageous, very painful and beautifully structured film. Filmmakers who have inspired me personally are Ossama Mohammad and Omar Amiralay, to whom I owe a lot. They are great artists and they have always been very generous when newcomers come knocking on their door.
Keep checking the web site to learn more about DOX BOX ’09 at:
http://www.dox-box.org. I have strong intentions and hopes of being able to report live from Damascus during the festival but details on that are still being worked out. Stranger things have happened--stay tuned.
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