Polaris director Ainara Vera
Spanish director Ainara Vera tells Business Doc Europe about her dramatic and at times sumptuous new doc Polaris, selected for Cannes ACID, that tells of two French sisters whose lives are polar opposites: Hayat, the immensely capable skipper of a boat that traverses the freezing Arctic Sea between Iceland and Greenland, and her younger sister Leila, not long out of jail and soon to give birth to the baby Inaya.
Vera’s visually striking film itself emerged from another highly cinematic undertaking. Vera was working as first assistant director on Victor Kossakovsky’s Aquarela (2018), a documentary that takes audiences on a rich and expressive journey through the transformative and raw power of water.
During the produuction the team had to travel by boat from Portugal to Greenland across a very stormy Atlantic. “It was a death trip,” says Vera. “We were facing a huge storm with huge waves. But the skipper of that sailboat was Hayat, the main character of my film. She was really an extremely powerful woman. We were a team of maybe 10 people and she was taking the responsibility to bring us safe to Greenland in very rough conditions. So I was really impressed by her.”
Even in calm conditions Hayat would carefully steer the boat, at night and alone, past the hundreds of small but deadly icebergs in the Arctic waters. When Vera joined Hayat on deck one evening, she listened to the skipper’s life story – and found the subject for her next feature documentary.
Both Hayat and her sister had to overcome a painful childhoods in the South of France, daughters of an alcoholic mother and a non-existent father, and were continually farmed out to foster parents. This developed within Hayat an attitude both of intense seriousness but also a tendency to take on responsibilities. Leila, on the other hand, is more carefree and considerably less capable than her older sibling, and when the director spoke to Hayat on the boat Leila was serving time in jail back in France.
“Hayat told me she did not have the courage to go and visit her sister in jail because it was too much emotionally for her,” says Vera. “She was capable of doing this incredible trip to Greenland, but something that [seemed] for me much more easy was to go and meet her sister. It was a really big challenge for her. Then, unconsciously, I decided myself that I will accompany her to visit her sister in France. And this is how I started the film.”
Such were the circumstances of Hayat’s loveless upbringing, she developed over the years an attitude of cynicism. “Even if you see the demonstration of love you will not believe it. You will not believe it because you will not have the base. Something is missing,” she says in the film.
Which is why she is determined to break the cycle when her sister becomes pregnant and gives birth to the baby Inaya. Hayat wants the child to grow up in a world where she is surrounded by love and support, so unlike her own development during childhood.
The film’s title is therefore poignant on many levels. Not only does the serious Hayat continually navigate her boat by the Pole Star, the life she has hitherto led is a polar opposite of the glorious future life she plans for her beloved niece.
“When the newborn Inaya was going to be born, Hayat was projecting herself in the little girl,” says Vera. “And she was all the time saying, ‘we need to give this child the opportunity that we did not have, we need to give this child a normal life, a normal childhood. She should not endure what we went through.’ So from very beginning, Hayat was forgetting completely about herself and just thinking and projecting what she can do to make the life of her niece better. This movement of her soul is [something] I really respect.”
“You know, a lot of people with trauma, they are very egocentric because they are in pain, and they think about their pain and what happened to them,” Vera adds of her philosophical core protagonist. “But Hayat was not like that. She was transforming that pain to make something better, to transform it into something beautiful. And in her case it was not only to give money, but to be an example. To tell them, look, if you work hard, if you wish you can change, then you have some control over your destiny. You cannot decide where you are born and in which family, in which continent, but indeed you have some power to do things better.”
The film features just the three females, even though other people are referenced throughout, such as a boyfriend/potential husband of Hayat. For Vera, these other characters were a distraction, folk whose eventual importance in the narrative was impossible to gauge.
“I saw in the last three years many people coming in and out of their life [but] I did not know from the beginning who of those persons will be actually very relevant in their [later] life,” she says. “I have friends I still keep since I was two years old, but it’s not the same in their case, especially with Leila. One day, she has a very, very good friend, but in six month’s time she does not talk to that person anymore. So for me, it was very tricky to introduce people who I didn’t know how much, how big a role they will be in their life.”
The film, produced by Point du Jour Les Films du Balibari/Ánorâk Film and sold by The Party Film Sales, received financial support both from CNC and US-based Chicken and Egg Pictures. Receiving assistance from the latter meant an application process similar to taking a ‘final exam,’ says Vera, but one which greatly benefited the production.
“You have to review all your ideas, review all your texts, review all your footage and really make the most of it,” she says. “Because you know that you are in competition and fighting with the whole world, and with fiction filmmakers. So it really helps you to improve your film, not to be satisfied with the [original] idea, to be very clear and to be more radical. It’s really challenging to go through this process, but it, it really makes your film better.”
