Interviews
Just in my day-to-day life, if I am walking through the city at a very quick pace, I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of details. I might not notice that the flowers are blooming. Likewise, being in a movie theater and sitting still for a time allows a viewer to really be able to appreciate those small movements.
I tend to shoot quickly, so I always have a little extra time every day to be able to have these moments that we call “bonuses.” There are moments where I didn't end up using what was scripted and only used what was improvised.
To be honest, I think of Blue Heron as the origin story of all my films and life. My previous works were all trying to process things that happened relatively more recently, and Blue Heron in a way is what led to all those things. My brother is the beginning of our family’s stories.
I only realized as an adult the really violent side of the British presence, not only in Palestine but also in most of the countries they colonized. Part of the story that was left out was the Palestinians talking about the revolt, how we organized the longest strike in history, and we did this without talking about the trauma of it.
In the last two or three years, I have had the feeling that the people who live around me in Germany don't believe in the future. They’ve started to build up caves for themselves, where they want to survive. This feeling, that one’s story is a story of survival, is new for me.
Both of us always mention in our master classes or panels with cinema students to choose a subject that you really like for your projects because you are not sure how long you are going to spend on the project. Better to choose something that is very close to your heart.
I said maybe I will do a film about the worst version of myself in 20 years, and then that is when I reconnected with the poetry world, because making a film about a filmmaker wasn't that interesting to me.
This is a very profoundly intimate, personal family story. So while certain dates are very important because of historical events, I wanted the 1970s to have less of that. I wanted for us to see a sense of normalcy with this family.
The new book from J. Hoberman traverses a wide swath of mediums and movements that, in his telling, coalesced into what we now recognize as the counterculture of the mid-to-late 1960s.
I realized that we Black people really have never had our CNN or our New York Times, but we are remarkably well-informed. Even a lot of the uneducated class of folks are remarkably well-informed. I had to ask myself: How is that? Why is that? How are we getting this information?
While we were conversing, I think it was important to give her all my ears and my being, myself, to listen to her. This was really key because we differed in our points of view about certain things. Quite a few things, I would say: the role of women in life, tradition, faith.
The further one delves into Creton and Barré’s catalogue, the more the films begin to feel like pieces of an indivisible whole, one that encompasses the entirety of their personal and professional lives.
Once we committed to the body camera footage, we were determined to live in it. We wanted to build and recreate the world that this community existed in, which you couldn't do otherwise. So, it was challenging at times, and there were moments I doubted it.
Alboury will not come inside, and he will not go home, either; the more the two men try to feel each other out, the less likely it becomes that one or the other is going to budge. This is a compelling setup, sociologically and emotionally loaded.