He distrusts words and invests images in a way that is as powerful as it is surprising. To talk about an uprising in Sudan, director Ali Cherri tells in “The Barrage” the story of a bricklayer near a dam on the Nile. One day, the worker decides to secretly build a monumental sculpture endowed with mysterious powers… Interview.
RFI : You are a visual artist recognized by a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2022 and a director invited to the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. How someone who was born in 1976 in Beirut, studied in the Netherlands and exhibited in New York, Paris and London, finds himself in Sudan to shoot a film ?
Ali Cherri : I think it is more natural for me to end up in Sudan than in New York or the Netherlands [rires]. My work is very much rooted in questions of the history of this region, the history of violence. I was born in Lebanon at the beginning of the civil war, so I lived through the whole war in Lebanon. The questions that interest me are those related to this story, even when I go further, whether in Sudan or New York. I think it’s also to understand where I come from.
The dam, is the story of a sculpture that comes to life in the middle of the desert. As a visual artist or director, has it ever happened to you that a work or a person in a film has come to life outside of an exhibition or a cinema? ?
Yes. In any case, in my work, I try to defend that objects, things have a life and that we should listen to them. This construction in the film which suddenly comes to life, I don’t think I invented it. In the history of mankind, there are plenty of stories of objects, golems, mud creatures, things that emerge from the earth and come to life. Adam (Enkidu), he is created from mud and he took life in Gilgamesh. He is fashioned from mud and he comes to life. So I am part of a much longer tradition. If we listen and pay attention to things, we realize that everything is alive.
In your previous movies, was there a character or thing that came to life outside of the theater ?
I don’t think we make a film. We just create the conditions: the light, the image, the voices, the sound, the music, the actors… All of this comes together to create something. We can call it a life, a feeling, an emotion, grace… In this sense, it is the creative gesture of the artist. It is God who creates. And in the same way, when you create a film, at some point, it can also come to life. It can have its life independent of us.
In the film, we follow Maher, a poor worker in a brickyard near a dam on the Nile. The spectator realizes that, with the same materials with which he makes the bricks, Maher also creates something else. A secret work, made up of water, mud, fire, the strength of his hands. But this time it is not a tool of oppression controlled by the state, like the dam or the brickyard, but a work at the service of the imagination, of freedom and even of a revolution. When you started shooting the film in 2017, dictator Omar al-Bashir was still in place. Why the Sudanese authorities let you shoot a political fable in their country ?
From the start, the project Dam was a political project. For me, talking about Dam, it is also to speak of an oppressive regime, a totalitarian regime, a dictatorship which, like this dam, imposes itself and tries to control and create a disruption. We tried to be very discreet to get the permissions. On the spot, the film was not called at all The dambut Maher. On paper, we were just interested in the story of the brickmaker, in highlighting traditional methods of construction… It was a story that bothered no one. So, a story that did not interest the authorities. We did not interview journalists, activists or intellectuals. So it was a field where we were given the space to do what we want.
As an artist, you come from plastic art. Your film is made up of incredible images, as delicate as they are unexpected. On the other hand, there are very few words, very few dialogues. beware of words ?
Yes. Actually, I don’t know if I distrust words, but I trust pictures more. This is the material with which I feel the most comfortable. I produce images. That’s what I know how to do. I can’t write very well. These are the tools that I try to use and work at the brickyard. For the most part, they are seasonal workers who are there to work for a few months, far from their homes and their families. They live four or five in the same cabin. There is a real sense of brotherhood between them. Every day there is someone who prepares food for everyone. At the same time, there is a lot of silence. They don’t talk to each other much. They talk to each other for work reasons: you have to do this or that, but nothing personal. It really interested me, these silences that speak a lot. It is these silences that are very important, they are only disturbed by the radio where we hear news coming from Sudan: about demonstrations, violence, deaths that reach them just like that, like a noise that destroys this silence.
Your way of filming is very particular. Sometimes the camera lays down, stretches out like a body, produces an image with the severed head of a person… Would you say that you are filming the mind more than the physical matter ?
I am very aware of the device, of the tool that I use, the camera, of this power that I have to frame. And I’m not trying to make it go away. For example, at one point, I film a character whose head is out of frame. It is a power that I have to cut off his head. Or someone crosses a plane and exits. You just hear what he’s doing offscreen. It’s just a sound that comes to us. It is a power to film. It is a power, this form of writing. As a result, I am very lucid and very transparent about this power that I use. I show that framing is also cutting heads.
This film is part of a long-term project, Geographies of Violence. Is it a map ? A book ? A plastic work ? A movie ?
Maybe it’s a question [rires]. It’s a question that comes from personal experience: What does it mean to survive? Survive a war. Do we ever survive? Me, I wasn’t injured or lost a leg, I didn’t die during the war. I simply survived. It’s a weight, this lightness of survival, when you feel completely destroyed, when everything works, everything works well. This project questions this: where does this violence that becomes invisible go?
Your previous works are also part of this project ?
For me, yes. Everything I do is around this question.
When did it start ?
With the very first work I did, A circle around the sun, where I very clearly talked about this. Related to bodies and ruins in Beirut. It was a film shot in 2004. There are already all the questions that continue to be present in my films today.