Director’s Statement of Intent
The film
will be shot in colour in 1:85 widescreen format on HDCAM. I would like to be
accompanied in this adventure by cinematographer Claire Mathon, who
photographed my previous film, Le Chemin Noir, whose technical know-how and artistic
sensibility is matched by her humane qualities which are precious assets when
shooting with non-professional actors.
Apart from
the Oran harbour, all pictures will be shot in the M’Sirda region where I was
born, in the top North-West corner of Algeria.
On screen,
I’ll play Omar. The final cemetery where we’ll shoot is where my grand-parents
and ancestors are buried. Omar’s sister will be my real sister, his father,
mine too, and the other characters, except for one, will be genuine Algerian
people.
While
shooting The Foreign Son, I’ll be on the lookout for what is fragile, hoping to capture it, and
to this end, we’ll be open to the unexpected which will surely offer us much
better, much truer material than what I could write. Characters are merely
sketched in the synopsis. People will be chosen to embody them onscreen because
of how they match what I’m looking for and how they know and can intimately be
what my film is involved in. They won’t need to “act out.”
To inhabit
the character of the deranged Lahcene, I’ll approach a particular dancer I saw
dance at the Algiers National Theatre at the end of a training session directed
by Abu Lagraa, the Algerian choreographer of “la Baraka” company. Before that
session, he had never taken part in any official contemporary dance. I’ll have this dancer meet
the real person whom the Lahcène character is based on. I’m sure that without
trying to imitate him, he’ll know how to endow his own body with the pain and
fright of the original Lahcène. Before the camera, I’ll often ask him to act
with economy and restraint. Once, however, releasing his raw creativity and
fantastic energy in the heart of nature, he will display a wild, striking
danced figuration of the courage mixed with despair that may inhabit theAlgerian
youth.
A
voice-over will thread along the film: it will be in the first person. It will either
be Omar’s or his sister’s voice. They are not “psychological” voices expressing
feelings or a perception of the situation onscreen. As presented in the
examples of the treatment, they tell of a time in the past of the siblings, of
a little detail remained on the side, suspended in their memory. I imagine
these voices often speaking over close shots of Omar’s – his body, this face –
with an almost imperceptible camera movement, as if we circled slowly around
him to slip into his head and read an occasional dream. Close shots of Omar’s
face will be rare, aiming to provide breathing spaces in the film during which
the viewer will actively make up his own story while Omar wonders about all
these things he saw, the words he heard or the dreams he dreamt. Nothing in his
face will show his state of mind – surprise, despair or hope. It will be the
size of this body within the frame that will tell the state he is in. For
instance, when he is a dot in the picture, he is lost.
In the
Ghazaouet harbour sequence, when Omar meets that young man who spills his guts
and rambles: “my country, it’s here… in my head…,” we’ll mainly see the
speaker, the face of that man will take up the whole image, and only at the end
of the sequence will we cut to Omar in whom the words of that desperate and
lucid young man still resound.
The archive
footage will chiefly represent the Algerian point of view – fighters halting or
walking rather than pictures of actual fighting. They will not be featured as
objective documents. The Algerian war caused the death of over a million
Algerians, and there were other conflicts before it. The recent bloody decade
also made 200,000 victims. Under Omar’s eyes, it will be as though those dead
came back to life momentarily so that he can be in touch with them while he is
walking across that land. As if, in order to adopt him, the Algerian land
needed that he made his own everything it covered, everything “in its guts”–
all the children the land lost, all those peasant dwellings burnt or deserted
by the war…
I will view
the archives at the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel. I’ll ask them for their
support and collaboration, which will be precious, as for my previous feature
film.
There will
also be sounds – the sound of helicopters, of planes, or bursts of gun fire,
and even sometimes a lone gun shot that will be heard across the virginal
landscape, without our knowing whether it is a memory of the past Algerian war
or the present-day Algerian army tracking down Islamists, or else a hunter in
the underbrush covering the hills.
Sound will
constantly be a very important element in the film since Omar walks in a
slightly hypnotic way, as if blind, and as a blind man, will be all ears. The
sound of a motorcycle running in the distance will for instance bring up the
fresh memory of an older brother’s motorcycle taking Omar as a child to the
banks of the river Mosel, in France, or the sound of a metal chainsaw will
remind him of French factories where Omar worked. Sound will not systematically
correspond with what is on screen and the meaning of a sequence will often
emerge from the friction between image, sound and sometimes the voice-over –
each of these elements being like the particular line of an instrument on an
orchestral score.
We’ll
probably hear some pieces of film music, which will be those that Omar carries
inside him: classic contemporary music such as Arvo Pärt’s when Omar is drowned
in nature, but also jazz music – such as The Art Ensemble of Chicago or Archie
Shepp – when he meets with harragas, those young people wanting to leave, but
where to?
Image will
be more important than word. Rhythmic, visual and sound correspondences – this
work that will be done at the editing stage will express Omar’s hesitation, his
sense of loss, and later the profound joy of reuniting with his kindred.
As we read
earlier, Omar is always on foot. Only once will we see him get out of a car. It
is a yellow taxi that drops his in front of the house turned into a bunker
where he was born, and where he meets his old uncle and aunt. At editing, we’ll
make sure that those yellow taxis driving along the winding roads are felt like
a threat. It is one such vehicle that Omar has seen when he left the port city
at the beginning of the film. It carried a coffin and seemed inhabited by
ghosts. These cars roam around as if looking for him, like predators for their
prey – probably a metaphor of that fear that never lets go of Omar, the fear of
meeting his own people as he gets closer to them, the fear of what that meeting
will cause in him, the fear of dying in the process and being also carried like
a corpse – a fear of stepping “through the looking glass” and not finding the
way back to the life he left behind in France. My editor and I will make it
perceptible through slight touches, so that it only brushes on the viewer’s
mind. However, the viewer will have other reasons to imagine that this journey
is a crossing, a passage to “the land of the dead.” Indeed, upon Omar’s first
visit, the family cemetery is deserted. When he comes back again later, it will
be crowded: his father will be there, and his sister too, a tragic figure
dressed in black, and horsemen as well, dressed as those of Emir Abdelkader,
against entrancing background music. Which side of the mirror will we then be
on?
The narration
borrows from the fairytale. It is the country itself and its history that come
to Omar and unveil to him. Omar is moved around more than he moves himself, as
if that journey was a dream which Amina, the little fairy of tales, has
inspired in him. However, Amina will not be a hieratic character. She will be
very real, laughing, playing like children do, and yet, she will also be the one
watching over Omar’s sleep, bringing him to do what he has not done – visit his
mother’s grave. It is Amina who will put a tortoise in his hand like an
appeasing animal, as if to say: “Go ahead without fear, you are on the right
way.” Amina can also be viewed as the eyes of Algerian nature fondling this
prodigal son returning to her, but also as the eyes of Fatima, the sister whom
we’ll never know whether she is alive or dead.
It is a
story of land. The landscapes where we’ll shoot are located right by the sea.
But we’ll frame them in a way that places the Algerian blue sky and the sea on
the edge or off screen altogether. The sea, which will take up the whole screen
in the opening of the film, will only be seen again at the very end, in the
epilogue. The Algerian nature has “dressed up” to greet her returning son. It
is rugged and beautiful, virginal looking: spreads of wild grass, rocks, trees,
flowers, animals, bathed in the soft spring light. The viewer will be free to
imagine that the shepherd seen catching a lamb to sling it across his shoulders
may be Jason, on his quest of the golden fleece.
