Rania Stephan is the director of In Fields of Words: Conversations with Samar Yazbek.
The words of Samar Yazbek carry images. In which ways do these images of words contribute to such a vivid and organic structure in the film?
The first time I read a text by Samar Yazbek, I was struck by her capacity to write with images, in a renewed Arabic language and a contemporary manner. It was like a film and that’s what interested me in her writing. It was important to start the film with this striking statement on the way she write. This idea gave me the freedom to paint some of the images and explore Grading as an essential element to build my narrative, just like sound, music, text and archive.
When watching this film, there is a roaming, a musical wander, moments of rest between text and written word, and Samar Yazbek’s speech. All of this is structured by a musical tone, almost opera-like. How did you arrive at this symbiosis between sound and image?
I wanted the spectator to experience different registers of relations with words: listening, reading, hearing literature. The music I choose comes mostly from pioneer women composers of early electronic music, who worked with computers and analogue instruments. I feel very close to this approach, using analogue and digital tools alike. I like to trace the layers of images and sounds and not erase their origins. The film was built in a way whereby images, sounds, music, words and texts resonate and interlace, like a visual opera.
Samar Yazbek tells us that, within the last 5 years, her relation with death and with words changed. After working in this film, to which extent has your own relation with death and images been impacted?
We started these filmed conversations in 2013. The film took nearly 10 years in the making. During this decade, our lives have totally changed, Lebanon has collapsed, Syria has disappeared in a way… The film is a miraculous survival of this chaos. But Samar’s new novel will soon be released and the film will be shown on a big screen in Lisbon. Despite the fact that we live in these turbulent times, surrounded with death and turmoil, we managed to make cinema and literature. So somehow, I don’t know how, there is still light in this darkness.
