“I want to design my own frame”

Interviewers: Ran Tal and Anat Even

Translated by Tal Haran

We decided to write about Ibtisam Mara’ana’s first film, Paradise Lost (2003) in this issue, and realized this was an opportunity to finally meet her for a talk. Mara’ana became a mother about four years ago and her life took a turn. Her struggle-laden personal and cinematic life is represented in every one of her films. Now, as a mother of a daughter and living in Jaffa, her dilemmas have become much more pronounced. Apparently, she is now observing her magnificent film career and beginning to hatch her next film.

How are you, Ibtisam, it seems that things have been changing for you lately?

After my daughter was born, there were two films being produced and I was entangled in major questions, which were not there before. I hadn’t given them a thought, issues of points of view. Before I became a mother, the perspective through which I saw the world and the questions I asked were mainly about women and personal freedom. I was less interested in a mother’s point of view, the parent’s, what she feels. I was less interested in the father’s gaze at his daughter, it simply didn’t concern me. I was interested in what the female protagonist goes through, and my whole heart and filmmaking and efforts would turn to her, to her point of view. When I became a mother, suddenly I had a different perspective.

And I have not managed to break through this dilemma. What is my own point of view? Do I look at my daughter and run with her the way I did previously? – That is something I can no longer do. I can no longer ignore the mother, the agent of oppression, which unfortunately is what women are. I also found myself thinking about the mother who looks at her daughter and her son, who experiences a process or a revolution or a rebellion. My heart is with them. Suddenly I am torn.

I have great empathy for mothers, compassion, understanding, suddenly I understand why a mother oppresses her daughter. Because she wants to protect her. Because society is horrible. She needs her family, she needs for her daughter to return at the end of the day. So there’s a family, there’s a mother, and there’s a daughter, and the mother won’t take the family apart because she knows that she is living in chaos and oppression’ anyway. and cannot take it all apart. Suddenly I understand this side too.

Did this stop you?

Yes, it shakes me. I recall making a film for years about Palestinian LGBTQ society, before I gave birth. I had a protagonist whom I had filmed for four years – someone from Jaffa who didn’t come out of the closet for his family. As long as I was not a mother, I ran along with him. The main thing was his freedom, for him to do his thing, and I was with him on his journey. I would film at his home too, and the mother would sit there, praying. And she didn’t know what I was doing there. She knew that her son was a great artist, but I had my own secret. He and I had our secret, and I know that I was not filming him just because of his art. His art is also his sexual identity. But she doesn’t know this.
I filmed and filmed and we were deliberating about this the whole time, what would happen when you come out in the film and your mother would be exposed to it for the first time like everyone else. I lived with this in peace. And when I gave birth and Sophia was six-months old, I was walking in a street with her in a pram, and I called the guy and told him that we must meet, because I don’t think we can continue the way we did before. When we met, I said to him: You must accept responsibility and tell your mother, not so much your father, men do not play a role in this for me. She cannot just sit there like everyone else in the living room and watch the film about you, telling everyone who you are. And he said: I am not taking responsibility. She will see it in the film. I said I don’t accept responsibility for this.

And the film?

Buried. I called the Fund and told them: I am not making this film.

Ethical issues?

Yes. After all, every one of my films can open a broad, complex ethical discussion. But I was not too concerned about the ethical issue until then. The matter was quite clear. When I have a female protagonist, I am with her. Now I have a one, but facing another protagonist who is oppressed herself. And I cannot ignore this. I identify with her more than I do with the protagonist herself.

This is linked to what drove you from the beginning – your own mother.

I pretty much ‘raped’ my mother with my films. You brought me into this world, accept responsibility. I make films, I have things I need to say, you will face the camera and cope. She loves me very much, so she didn’t escape. She coped. To this day I’m paying for having turned her into a character in my films. That’s not exactly what she wanted. What does she know about films, my mother? What has she got to do with the films I make? My mother sits all day watching religious leaders, on Qatari and Kuwaiti and Lebanese TV channels, perhaps some Iranian too, who speak to her all day about idolizing God. Respecting Him and thinking about the day of her death. She does not watch my films on television. That is certainly not the channel she would watch. She is not proud of the films I have made, so I never asked her. I have never asked her whether she wants to be in the movie. Isn’t that a basic question you need to ask your protagonist in a film? The camera lands on her and I begin to chatter and fill her head with my questions, and go cope. The longer you keep silent, the stronger the drama.

How does she not refuse you?

She copes as any mother does with a rebellious daughter. I do what I want, I marry a Jew, I rebel. But she accepts this. I am her child. She recognizes this. Whether she likes it or not – it’s her daughter. At the end of the day, she wants her contact with me, period.

Your personal and cinematic move is complex and very inspiring for many who follow you. How did you suddenly feel that films were your world?

I was not exposed to films as a child. I did not see films before I began studying. I wanted to be an anchor on Israeli TV’s Channel 1. That’s what I wanted. I wanted people to turn the TV on and see me speaking. See me on screen, hear what I have to say. I didn’t see films. Neither American, nor Palestinian, nor Israeli, certainly not documentaries. Television meant satellite dishes. In the winter they would be out because of lightning, so there wasn’t even that. But we had a video library in the village, and my brother was responsible for bringing films, mainly Indian ones, and so twice a week we’d sit together, the whole family, and watch Indian films. And the experience was that of a family watching something that is dramatic and embarrassing. That’s all I saw. I began writing newspaper items when I was very young. At fourteen I began to publish my first ones. Critical texts about the goings-on in Arab society. Especially about infrastructure, sewage flowing in the streets, a God-forsaken village, boredom and neglect. I discovered my strength in writing. I grew up in a home that neither read nor wrote. Father was illiterate, mother too. Every Friday all sorts of magazines would arrive from Palestine, and I began to discover the First Intifada. I discovered girls, boys, war. Writing about revolution, resistance, I began to read. Every Friday I would take 5 or 10 shekels from my mother, which was quite a sum, and she knew I would sit and read these magazines. Every Friday I would pore over newspapers, Kul Al-Arab and Al-Sunara, and decipher them. My room was one big pile of newspapers. I began to investigate and place myself in the world, in a home that is not very politically oriented. Socially it is – my mother is a feminist, working in households, father unemployed, dysfunctional. And then I really began to write and publish in the Arabic press. I went to an Arabic high-school in Haifa and became a rebellious girl with a big mouth, led revolutions in school, I would lead class strikes, wreak general havoc.

I felt very critical of Arab society. Jewish society didn’t interest me. My only encounter with Jewish society was when I would get on the bus or in the car with my mother, clean Jewish homes and return home.

I took in a lot at that time. I saw many stories, dramas, tragedies, offenses, hard-working women side by side with my mother, cleaning houses, facing difficulties. I decided to study journalism in a school called Koteret (headline) in Tel Aviv. I didn’t pass their exams, I was very desperate, very sad, I wanted so much to be a journalist. I went on looking and discovered the film school at Giv’at Haviva, which suited me because I needed a place where I could both work and study. Daytime I attended film school, and at 4 p.m. I would go work in the dining hall at Giv’at Haviva. The first year was disastrous. I lived in Giv’at Haviva. I became independent at the age of 19. I was the youngest one there, the first Palestinian in the school, and didn’t have the slightest idea who was who.
I remember Yvonne Miklosh arriving at her photography classes with her equipment. All the men would go crazy with the equipment, the boom, the camera, all of them with that big gadget, and she was such a notable figure with a camerawoman’s lingo, and they understood what she was saying. The Israelis were post-army, 26, 27, 28-years old, adults, and I was a girl. I understood nothing at all, my Hebrew was nil. And when that first year was over, I said to my mother: listen, I won’t continue, I have no interest in this, I’ll have a career like yours, cleaning, working in dining halls… She answered: No way. You’re not coming back home. She didn’t realize what I was doing in film. I told her: I’ll be a wedding photographer. That’s what I knew. And she said: You’re not leaving. You’ll finish your studies, and then you’ll do what you want. And if you need financial assistance, I can help you, with 500 shekels a month. And you’ll survive this next year.

Then came a man who affected my life – Micha Livne, a documentarist, who taught us documentary film. Wow. I looked at him, he was a big man, perspiring the whole time, a good man, attentive. I don’t know why but he was interested in Arab society, he saw me. All those Tel Avivians didn’t see me, I won’t call them by name, I still remember every single one. But Micha Livne saw me. He saw me. I spoke with him about the forty unrecognized Arab villages. And he knew what I was talking about. And he went with me and listened, and changed my life right then and there. When Micha spoke with me about documentary film, I understood. It was as though I had absorbed it from infancy. It was familiar, I realized that this was what I had been looking for my whole life, I just didn’t know what it was called. And I made my first film as a student.

What was it about?

About the forty unrecognized Arab villages. These villages are not connected to the electric power grid, to water, or have any kind of infrastructure. Unfortunately, I was not present at the end-of-the-year event where it was projected, because my sister, one year older than me, passed away that month, so I had no idea how the premiere went.
I finished my studies but it took me a good couple of years. I went back to live with my parents and hold their hand, mourn the death in the family. When I recovered, I opened a film and television major in the village school.

The principal had no idea what this was about. I said to him: give me a year. I’ll prove to you that we’ll have male and female students and we’ll have a film major. For some years I was a part of the education world, school, I’d get up every morning, go to school, teach, come back, prepare students for their matriculation exams, but felt a bit sleepy.

Until I heard about your film, Ben Zvi Road 67 (R.T.). I was very busy with my sister’s death at the time, it was very tragic. Not murder, medical negligence. Her death was unmentionable in our home. They simply wouldn’t speak. Silence. So, when I heard that a film was made about the Institute of Forensic Medicine, I said ‘wow’. I saw my sister’s body after the autopsy, and I wanted to know what was there. What is this place.
I remember going to the library at Giva’at Haviva and taking out a VHS copy, sitting in my room in front of the TV set, and watching the film. I wanted to look for her. To feel something from her that had disappeared. I remember thinking – wow, I need to get out of my coma, out of this paralysis, stop mourning and begin to tell a story. My point of view is critical, this point in time is critical.

How did you begin?

I worked with Duki Dror on his two films. I did everything. Production, research, assistant director, and thought: If Duki Dror knows how to make films about Arabs, so do I. It’s not complicated. Only later did I realize that most of the films I made were stories stemming from my young experiences. Age twelve to eighteen was a period of time that was like a well out of which I drew my stories.

For example?

Paradise Lost (2003) was based on the story of Suad (Ghnaim), my childhood hero. She would go in and out of jail, the GSS (Israel’s General Security Services) were after her. The whole village lived in fear. I didn’t really know her story, but the fear, the anxiety, the shame, everything was there. The Nakba (1948 disaster), the woman’s vagina. For she was raped in jail. This drove everyone crazy. The fact that this woman was raped. That’s what interested them, the woman’s body – to whom does it belong… This is what shook them. They were less interested in what she did as a political activist. What scared them was that if Suad was raped because of her political activism, then that is what will happen to our daughters if they open their mouth. It was always there. My body is abandoned, and if I am not watched over and put inside a cage, I could be raped at any moment, this body belongs to everyone. It’s from there that I reached Suad, strongly feeling fear, silence, and a woman standing at the heart of the story.

Where does your feminist gaze come from? It’s present in your films from the very beginning.

From my mother.

Elaborate, please. Your mother is a religious woman living in a traditional society.

Hers was an arranged marriage with my father and she very soon realized he could not function. Only in recent years, after I had my own child, did I realize that my father was suffering from post-trauma effects of the Nakba. He was 12-years-old when he had to dig graves in Tantura village. And he kept silent. He could not function, most of the time he kept silent. He would stare, smoke, and weep. My mother had a child, and another and another, and found herself with children and an absent partner. So, she got up, took a bag, not speaking Hebrew, illiterate, and went out to knock on doors of Jewish families in Zichron Yaacov. In sign language she explained that she wants to clean house. This is how she began, and soon found her own financial independence. From that moment, the man who sat at home – sometimes shouting, at others silent and not functioning as a father – would not tell her what to do. She is a woman, she brings money home, finances him, finances her children, pushes us all to get an education, schooling. That is the source of my feminism. We would sit with her, my sisters and brother, and do our homework, and she couldn’t read, she couldn’t explain to me what was written on the page, neither in Arabic, nor in English. But she would ask us to read her the text, and she would criticize it, and that’s how dialogue would surround the text. All spoken. This was a very unusual learning experience, it was surprising. And she went on surprising, when at a very early stage she signed up for evening classes to learn reading and writing. We, her daughters, would sit with her and help her do her homework. I remember the sparkle in her eyes. How happy she was to be able to read. She began leaving notes for her employers, and they were thrilled to know she was reading and writing. They left her notes back: ‘Have a good day, Hitham’. She would bring us those notes home, all excited. It was a crazy revolution. She was amazing.

On one hand you as a teenager experience male oppression, on the other hand you have a dysfunctional father at home.

That was the greatest gift I received in my life, a dysfunctional father. That is what made me come out. It took me time not to be ashamed of him as a dysfunctional father, I was always ashamed. My father would take his bike and ride to Tantura, to the beach, to that village, the remains, he would spend most of his days there.

Didn’t he work?

No. Perhaps one month a year, in farming or construction. He was a gifted man, but he couldn’t function. Simply couldn’t. I never really bothered to understand why.

And his relationship with your mother?

There were many rumors in the village. What was said to him in the village? You have a wife who is the man, she wears the pants in the family, and he had to keep a bit of his honor with her, and my mother never gave up. She fought like a lioness.

That was your lesson.

Yes. And she didn’t pay a price. She fought patriarchy. She was not a battered wife – he wouldn’t raise a finger against her. He would yell at her, and she would yell back. My father had no driving license, she was the one who took one out and immediately bought a car. When he got on her nerves, she would open the door and say: Get off, now.
I watched this relationship and realized it was possible.

In your first film, Paradise Lost, there are these two story-lines, the private-personal and Suad’s – the political.

It was the opportunity to tell Suad’s story, for it had to be told. I wanted to tell her story, give her a place of her own. And at the same time, look around at the place where I lived. What is this home, who are my mother, my father, what is this place of mine. From which I want to fly away. I want my freedom, like Suad. I left home at 29.

The film gave you the option to get out?

In the voice-over, the last sentence was: ‘I want to be a free woman’. My mother saw the rough cut, I was living at home at the time and I had her watch it. When she heard that last phrase, ‘I want to be a free woman’, she got very angry and said: You cannot call yourself a woman. As long as you’re unmarried, you cannot call yourself a woman. From that moment I realized that my journey is in fact to be a free woman even if I’m not anyone’s wife.

When did you realize that you want to tell your own story as well, beyond Suad’s?

Suad wanted to be filmed as the main protagonist, she wanted herself and her family in the film. Without my own family, which is not considered important in the community. She had a hard time being seen beside me, for her I am a political ignoramus from an average family. And she, Suad, is learned, has a Ph.D. in law, lives in England. But I insisted. I realized the film could not be built only on her. I needed the backing, and not be dependent on my protagonist alone. I built two backbones, I as a director would be a backbone in the film. I need this backing.

You have always fought on several fronts: your cinematic voice, the Palestinian voice, and your voice as a woman.

At first, I was not aware of this, I was not even interested in what was said about me. My first film, out in 2003, was actually the first Palestinian film in which a woman brings a camera into her own home. It was very strange, for the Palestinian audience as well. What is this abandon?!

Did you project the film in Fureidis?

Not in Fureidis. But it was on Channel 8, when cable channels started, so people were still connected.

How did it go over in the family?

Father was sweet, he was happy with the film. At long last he was being seen. For him it was the greatest love gift a daughter could give her father. He would sit in the village café and everyone would come and congratulate him, all kinds of Jewish women from Zichron and the whole area, they’d come to buy humus and see him on their way, so they would go up and hug him, and my dad really loves hugging women. It really did him good. No one had seen my father until he was 60. After this film suddenly people began to identify him. He has a name, a face, he can get a hug. This didn’t happen before.

Your second film takes place at Jisr A-Zarka, Al Jisr (2005). What made you go there?

These two villages, Jisr and Fureidis, are very much alike. It’s the same population of women going off to clean houses, their men sitting, subdued. The women clean houses, come back and give their men half their salary.

Here too, the women interested me. It’s an amazing place, beautiful and caged in between Caesarea, the Mediterranean Sea and the coast road. Black women – I very much identified with their skin color. It’s a kind of stigma, the lowest imaginable, and no one marries them. They marry within the family, with their cousins, so there are lots of medical issues.

In some of your films you enter with your own story, and in others you take a step back.

They are all connected to me in experience and in entity.

Sure. But what makes you decide one way or the other?

In some films I am not afraid to take a journey and tell a personal story. In other films
I am very much afraid of such a journey. So I look for characters who will go on that journey in my stead. In Jisr there were three unmarried female protagonists. Being single there is very typical. Before this I couldn’t speak about it. I didn’t want to say that I myself was ambivalent about being single. Is it predetermined or something I take upon myself? So, I depended on others to speak about it. And they say: I’s alright, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, you can be single and it’s alright, you don’t have to be married.

You made a series of very impressive films about the woman’s need to be free, and at some point you began to address not only the subject but also the essence of your films.

I think it began to attract me at some point in 77 Steps. This is not just my own personal story with my Jewish Canadian partner in Tel Aviv’s Florentin neighborhood; I wished to begin shaping a cinematic language for myself. I suddenly realized that my films, because of my complexity as a Palestinian, actually deal with identity. I keep moving on the geographic seamline – between a village, a city, Tel Aviv. What is Israeli identity? Belonging, a state, a nation?

In 77 Steps I wanted to relax a bit, I wanted my films to deal not only with struggle,
I wanted to rest a little. I wanted respite in film, in aesthetics. The opposite of the chase in Three Times Divorced. In that film, there I am with the camera, with the microphone, running like mad. The film Lady Kul Al Arab (2008) has a 16-year-old Druze girl threatened with murder. A crazy drama. Not a moment left to design a frame. The frame shapes itself. All my life I was shaped by reality. I began to understand that I would like to stop for a moment and design my own frame, not from a place of survival or drama.
I have an eye and I want the freedom to sit down, place a camera, make a frame and tell a story that need not be in a race.

What phase was the hardest for you?

My greatest wish in life was to get to Tel Aviv. That was a dream. Suddenly, when I got to Tel Aviv I went through a mad crisis. I remember my very first panic attack as I left my parents’ home. Suddenly racism was looking me in the face, as I looked for an apartment and could not find one because I’m Arab, this was a total shock. They would hear my name, understand who I am and goodbye, no way. Finally, I landed in some trailer in Rishpon (a rural place outside Tel Aviv). It took a long time to get to Florentin. Suddenly, coming downstairs and speaking Arabic was not obvious. An Arab is in town. I began to feel that I was breaking free of Jewish society that had sheltered me without asking. Here’s an Arab making films and they immediately shelter you, shelter my films, shelter who I am. I wanted to break free of this sheltering, too. I felt that the point has come in my life where the films that interest me are films made for Arab society.

Today would you change the films you made?

If I made the same films for an Arab audience now, they would not be the same.

The same topics, but directed at a different audience?

Yes, the same protagonists, but in totally different films.

Take Badal (2006) for example, how would you make it different?

I wouldn’t explain our culture all the time, neither to the audience nor to the funding sources. You’re busy all day explaining to people who sit there and decide to finance you, confirm whether the film works or not, for they don’t get the culture, they simply don’t. There are lots of layers in film, and if it were directed at the Arab audience, many things would come out. No less important is that I keep making films for Israeli cinema. The reference is not Palestinian cinema, because it’s really flourishing. And when it exists it is mainly films made by Palestinian men. Not much inspiration there.

This influenced your cinematic language as well.

Totally. I very much like films with narration. But usually it resulted from having to explain. For example, Write down, I am an Arab (2014) was extremely difficult. It’s complicated for the Hebrew-Israeli eye to comprehend the complexity of the Arab world. What Darwish brought, who he was. It took a lot of time and resources to produce this film without narration so that it would also be accessible to the Hebrew-speaking Jewish audience.

Do you feel you’ve managed to reach the Palestinian and Arab audience in the Middle East?

The Palestinian and Arabic audience in the Arab world is at a five-to-ten-year delay. Write down, I am an Arab is the first film that was reviewed a lot in the Arab world because of the character of Mahmoud Darwish. Most of them didn’t bother seeing the film, they were fed by things being written about it. They didn’t want to confront it. You come along and take apart the image of the national poet who wrote a poem about his Jewish beloved. Not land! And Darwish speaks Hebrew? No way.

How did people react when the film came out?

The film came out in 2014, and was totally smashed in the Arab world. A year ago, an Egyptian college professor from the American University at Cairo wrote to me, asking for the film, and I sent it to her. She saw it, and told me it was one of the best films she ever saw about poetry in the Arab world, and that she wishes to project it at Tahreer Square, they have an event there and she wants to show it. I said, go ahead, but I don’t think it would pass. She said: everything will be alright. And I said: just remember that Israel appears in the heading. She couldn’t manage to organize a projection of the film about the Palestinian national poet who also speaks Hebrew.

This gets you again as someone moving between Arabic and Hebrew.

Some of the criticism stems from my own identity, who am I. I am a village girl, Muslim, of an average family, making a film about our national hero. The person who should make such a film is a filmmaker from Nazareth, an urban guy, well-connected. If he would make such a film, the whole perspective would change. But me, from Fureidis village, making a film about our national hero, and now, when part of my name is Menuhin, married to a Jew?

Aren’t you tired? Every step you take in life entails so many struggles and lots of circles. Israeli racism, Palestinian politics, who is accepted and who isn’t – it’s exhausting.

Since I gave birth to Sophia, I have not directed a film. I am no less tired than I was before, but I am a lot more frustrated. The same struggles exist in the same arenas. But when I held a camera, those moments gave me a lot of power. Now I feel as if some power has been taken away from me. Because I am not doing; I am inside the same struggle, in the same arena, but not making films.

Were you punished for having dared to touch Darwish? For until then, you were embraced for everything you did.

I think that making a film about a national hero, for me, was like saying: I am worth it.
I had to go on a 15-years’ creative journey in order to say that I am worth it. All my previous protagonists are peripheral. Here was a declaration: I am a big girl now – I am a filmmaker.

How was Write down, I am an Arab born?

Darwish didn’t interest me in the beginning. I only fell in love while making it. I didn’t like him before.

So why did you begin?

I wanted to legitimize my marriage. My being half of a couple. I wanted to legitimize this relationship. I remember projecting 77 Steps in the town of Ar’ara, in the ‘Triangle’, to women and men educators. After a quarter of an hour all hell broke loose. The hall was packed, at least one-hundred people. Chaos. It was a first for me. They stopped the film after 15 minutes. Women, men, everyone began to shout – she’s here, she’s here, point at me sitting there in the audience. I told them – all a-tremble inside – at least let’s talk. I am sitting here, come and ask me questions. The women – always our agents of oppression – said ‘we will not legitimize our daughters marrying Jews, it doesn’t work like that’. And I said, what’s the story? You know the poem “Rita and the Rifle” by Mahmoud Darwish? Do you know he wrote it about his Jewish beloved? From the moment they said ‘you are not Mahmoud Darwish’, I was depressed for a month-and-a-half. I wanted to leave the country, I wanted to die. I went through a great crisis. After a month-and-a-half I got up and began to look for Rita, and that’s how I began to make this film.

It’s interesting that Rita made you begin your journey in the footsteps of Darwish.

Yes, Rita, not Mahmoud Darwish himself. I was looking for Rita. Because I wanted to get away from that lynch I went through in Ar’ara. It was crazy.

What did you know about Rita?

Not much. I knew she was Jewish. Only the small circle of Palestinian and Israeli elite who were close to Darwish knew what had happened. Simple people who go out to the field every morning and educate children were sure that Rita was the land.

How did you find her?

I read all of Darwish’s books and everything written about him. One day I sit in my office and receive a mail from a guy in Tiv’on, asking to buy all my films. I said, sure, and then he asked me what I was doing now. I told him I was looking for someone. Then he tells me he watched 77 Steps and was very moved because it reminded him of a love story he had had. I got curious and he told me he had a beloved who left him for someone very well-known in the Arab world. I said, don’t tell me it was Darwish’s beloved. And he says: yes. Don’t tell me it is Rita! And he says: yes. Her name is Tamar Ben-Ami, she’s in Berlin and here’s her number. That moment I went into a panic attack that totally paralyzed me for some hours. I went out to the Florentin streets with my phone and my dog, walked around the building some ten times and called her. I left her a message, she returned my call after 5 minutes. That’s when the film began, but it was about Tamar Ben-Ami-Rita. Darwish was of no interest to me at the time.

What a beautiful story.

I wanted to tell the entire Arab society that I had found Rita. Come, get acquainted. And he loved a Jewish woman and it’s alright. If he can, so can I.

What’s next?

I shall continue to make documentaries, but different from what I knew before. I think I have another round waiting for me with my family. I am existentially anxious that my mother will die and then I won’t have anyone to quarrel with all day… And I also write features. I am a bit tired of running after male and female protagonists and filming approvals, and I want to design my own frame.

At what point is the script now?

The first three lines are already on paper. It’s a beginning. Like all beginnings.