"Metro Sufi"

By Jim Quilty, *Filming music as a form of redemption* - The Daily Star - Beirut, Lebanon; Thursday, February 3, 2011

Mahmoud Kaabour discusses what he’s been up to since ‘Teta, alf mara’

Rotterdam: One of the handful of interesting films to emerge from Lebanon in 2010 was Mahmoud Kaabour’s amusing, sentimental, yet formally interesting little documentary “Teta, alf mara” (Grandmother, a thousand times).

This slim (48-minute) documentary reflects upon the filmmaker’s relationship with his grandmother, Hajji Fatima Kaabour, and their shared relationship with Kaabour’s absent grandfather, Mahmoud Kaabour.

The grandfather had been a violinist and an improvisational musician of some note and his improv work (taqsim) wafts throughout this film – both the original home recordings and contemporary updates performed by contrabassist Nabil Amarshi and his ensemble People Playing Music.

The music, Kaabour’s formal interventions and Muriel Aboulrouss’ camera work transform what could easily be a home movie into a lyrical contemplation of place and change, something recognized at last year’s Doha-Tribeca film festival, which awarded “Teta” its audience award and a jury special mention.

Kaabour’s film is screening out of competition at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, where the Doha Film Institute is also showcasing “Teta” and Ibrahim Batout’s “Hawi,” which took DTFF’s best film award in 2010.

“‘Teta’ was supposed to have a theatrical release in Beirut in February,” Kaabour says. “But now, thanks to the situation in the country, that was just pushed back to the first week in April, maybe, if the situation stabilizes a bit.”

Since Doha, Kaabour has been in the U.K., talking to distributors and sales agents. “It’s looking grim with sales agents,” he says. “We’ve been getting nice letters, all saying ‘I don’t know if we can sell this in 15 regions, so I’m not sure that this is for us.’”

Kaabour says the film was well-received at Tunis’ Carthage film festival and has had two special screenings – one at the opening of the Mathaf, the Museum of Modern Art in Doha; the other, the U.A.E. premier, hosted by twofour54 (the Abu Dhabi Media Authority, with whom Veritas, the film’s producer, is a partner) and the Abu Dhabi Film Commission.

“I’m waiting to hear back from the U.S.,” he continues, “to find out if it’s going to make it to Tribeca, or San Francisco. Tonight [Tuesday] is the European premier … If it comes out theatrically in Beirut and the U.A.E. and ends up in Al-Jazeera afterward … if it finds a home in museums, galleries, art house cinemas, and comes out on DVD and TV and gets a few different regions of the world, that’s not so bad.”

Kaabour has a number of new projects in the drawer. Nowadays he’s pitching a film that’s meant to go into production in June. “Champ of the Camp” will follow a Bollywood singing competition that’s been happening in U.A.E. labor camps for about three years now.

“It happens strictly in the camps but it’s a rock concert,” Kaabour smiled. “There are 3,000 viewers per camp and they’ve recently been letting champions from different camps compete for a national title.”

The idea grew from a film-screening event Kaabour runs in Dubai called Mahmovies: Music for the Eyes, which combines free music documentary screenings and concerts.

“We managed to secure permission from all the camps to let all the champs come out for the first time and give concerts to the Dubai public,” he recalls. “It was the first time that laborers and the people from the city meet, beyond running into each other, where everybody’s wearing blue overalls and they’re building and you’re not allowed to have any contact with them.

“It was a massive success, both for the singers – who were able to live their Bollywood dream for a night – and to people who felt vindicated from some sort of guilt they have about accepting the position of the laborers in the U.A.E.

“That inspired us to pursue a film that will actually take us into the realities of these people’s lives,” Kaabour continues. “Not to dig dirt, but to show how music becomes a raison d’etre and a driving force in people’s lives, which are otherwise quite crap.”

He says there will be formal similarities between “Champ” and “Teta.”

“It’s gonna be a magic-realist doc again [like ‘Teta’], where every performance turns into a music video or an illustration of a fantasy or a re-creation of their family photos.

“The idea isn’t to follow the winner but four people who progress through the game. Even if they don’t make it to the end, watching the competition though their eyes as people who lost could be intriguing.”

Kaabour also has a fantasy project that he says he’s been pursuing for the last four years or so. “Metro Sufi” will profile a number of Swiss, Dutch and German nationals (not immigrants) who have embraced Mevlevi Sufism – but not necessarily Islam, at least Islam as it’s conventionally practiced by pious Muslims.

“They let women whirl,” Kaabour smiled. “They have wine with dinner. To them, national responsibility comes before religion. They have quite a few interesting arguments among them.”

What all the subjects have in common is that Sufi practice has helped anchor them in an otherwise dislocating urban context.

“There’s a lot of talk about bridges between East and West. For me, these individuals embody the connection between the two cultures. Instead of reaching out to talk to someone else, they’re balancing a lifestyle that’s not hindering their affiliation to their home countries, or their high-ranking positions, or their contributions to society here in Europe.

“I think it could be inspiring to people in the Middle East. It’s a way of questioning the foundations of Mevlevi Sufism through a look at modern Europe and seeing whether it works.”

One of the strong central elements linking the new projects with “Teta” and his previous work is music. Kaabour lived in Canada for seven years and he says one of the main things he took away from that country was live music.

“Montreal is one of the most musical cities I’ve ever known,” he says. “They have bars and venues that have music 365 nights a year. You just step in. You may get one concert. You may get two.

“That presented an aspect of music appreciation that I didn’t have before. Before it was just about listening to records … Sometimes the music is so overwhelmingly affecting, yet they don’t have the resources to record it.

“It also gave me a chance to collaborate with musicians and specifically a group called Godspeed you Black Emperor. Musicians in that ensemble made the soundtrack of [Kaabour’s award-winning 2004 short] “Being Osama,” and that’s where I started my experiments of using music in an interesting way in cinema. “The soundtrack composer is one of the film’s Osamas. His contribution is to make musical commentary upon the stories of the other Osamas. In the film you see him playing with this ensemble live, so the soundtrack is live performance.”

Kaabour has tried his hand at being a musician himself and traces his relationship to music back to his grandfather’s influence.

“For me,” he says, “music is a much higher art form than cinema … I find cinema is a recycling of real life. It doesn’t offer me the escape from real life that the abstraction of music does.

“If a musician sits in a room with his guitar, he’s really connecting with his inner voice, then and there. By the time a filmmaker’s seen a single image of what he’s trying to create, so many hands have gone into the project …

“Everything we create in cinema is based on a rearrangement of reality – whether it be time, characters, places, lighting. While music heads in an opposite dimension where you’re generating something from seven sounds, basically. But there are always new musical structures, new renditions of the seven notes. It’s a language of letters but no words, so the possibilities are much higher.

“I make films, but when I need comfort I don’t go to the movie theater. I go to bars and just listen to what people are strumming.”