Poetry doesn’t play as big part in Farah Kassem’s life today as it did a few years ago when she was filming her debut feature We Are Inside (which world-premiered at Visions du Réel this week). Then, verse was at the forefront of her life, and she was writing some of it herself.
“But when I did this film, I knew the purpose was never for me to become the poetess of the year,” she says of her documentary. In the movie, she is shown spending time with her charming, sometimes irascible octogenarian widowed father, Mustapha. She is over 50 years younger than him. His abiding passion is poetry. His words are his world.
Mustapha’s health is failing. The film explores the father-daughter relationship in all its complexity. She wanted “to create situations where both our mediums could meet, my camera and his poetry,” the director remembers.
Kassem had been living in Berlin. She would go home to visit her father. They’d get on perfectly until they started discussing politics. Then they would be at loggerheads. She would end up retreating to her room but, after an hour or two, he would knock on her door and offer to read her his latest poem.
“It was beautiful, the way his body moved, the way he pronounced the letters,” Kassem recalls. She admits, though, that she couldn’t always understand the “old classical Arabic” he used in his writing.
Kassem discovered her father was part of a poetry club that met every Monday afternoon. He had been attending its meetings for many years and he invited her to join him.
The poets met in a lawyers’ office at 5pm. They were all in their 70s. They all ate sweets. Some of them were diabetic. A dozen of them sat in a room together and read to each other. Kassem remembers being “very touched” by their perseverance. Lebanon was in a difficult political and economic state but still they wrote and recited their verse.
“This was a generation that had witnessed a different Lebanon. They were all super-politicised in the past. Some of them dreamt of a secular Arab union….but then with the civil war and later the Syrian regime being present in Lebanon, they saw how their friends were silenced.”
The men sought an escape from the problems around them in their poetry.
Kassem talks of the sometimes paradoxical nature of the men’s beliefs. They were both traditionalist and progressive at the same time. “This was what was so interesting for me to capture in the film.”
There were times when Mustapha would write some verse that he was very proud of but would then wake up in the middle of the night, worried that his words were blasphemous.
“This is what makes him complex and special.”
On one level, Lebanon is a deep patriarchal society but Kassem says that when she was growing up, she was surrounded by very strong women.
This isn’t the first time Kassem had turned the camera on her own family. Her 2012 short My Father Looks Like Abdel Nasser was made after her mother died and dealt with the grief and loss she and those closest to her were experiencing.
Currently based in Brussels, Kassem is a director and an editor and is currently doing doctoral research in the Arts at KU Leuven and LUCA in Belgium. She did a Masters of Fine Arts in documentary filmmaking at DocNomads and also studied at the Danish National Film School.
We Are Inside is produced by Cynthia Choucair and has received support from multiple sources including Doha Film Institute, Chicken & Egg, the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Programme and the IDFA Bertha Fund. However, when Kassem first embarked on the project, she was all on her own. The idea for the film was suggested by her father at a time when she was facing visa difficulties.
“One of the reasons I went back [to Lebanon] was to be with him but whenever I have to go to Europe, I, like everyone from my region, have to deal with this visa situation. I was also waiting for my visa…he told me ‘since you are here and having nothing to do, why don’t you come to the club and see the men reading poetry. They will be very happy if you film them reading their poetry.’”
Thus the doc began. We Are Inside has taken seven years to complete. It was shot between 2017 and 2021. After her father’s death, Kassem initially put the project to one side. She had filmed 200 hours of material.
“It was very difficult for me to go back to the material. I would look and feel nothing. Or I would look and feel a lot…I was completely blocked for two years.”
Eventually, she and her producer decided to “build” the film in a linear way rather than to take a more fragmentary approach. As she looked back on her material, the director realised there was far more comedy in it than she remembered. This was partly the deadpan fatalism and sarcasm of the Lebanese people, using dark humour to deal with hard times.
When she showed some of the material to friends, they would tell her it was “hilarious.”
“I didn’t even realise there was humour…I never really noticed it,” the director admits. “I didn’t expect people to laugh so much.”
At the premiere in Nyon, the audience was guffawing most of the way through. “I wasn’t expecting this,” Kassem says. She adds, though, that she did begin to realise there was “something surreal” about the characters portrayed in the documentary – including herself. “You’d go into the hospital and you’d find these nurses singing. It’s really a film about these people who are, at every moment, trying to find alternatives and ways to deal with the reality. The humour is part of that.”
Sadly, the poetry club is no longer holding its meetings. One of the other poets died a few weeks ago. However, Kassem is hoping to organise a screening of the film in Lebanon at which all the old faces will come together again.
The film, she says, stands as her tribute both to her father and to his writing.
“Today, when I think about poetry, I think about him. It is my way of re-connecting with him, of remembering him by revisiting what made him passionate. This is my relationship to poetry today, going back to his books…maybe when he was alive I didn’t see so much the need to dig into the words.”
