Saudi Gazette reporter Roberta Fedele, left, interviews Saudi actress and director Ahd Kamel on the success of her recently released short movie “Sanctity” and her experience and opinion about the movie industry and Saudi society. — SG photo Roberta Fedele Saudi Gazette
JEDDAH – Looking for a Saudi filmmaker to represent the latest developments in Saudi visual arts at the Jeddah Art Week, the organizers of the event opted for Ahd Kamel, an emerging Saudi actress and filmmaker whose second directorial effort “Sanctity” was the first Saudi movie to be screened last February at the Berlin International Film Festival. Saudi Gazette had the privilege to exclusively interview the young actress and director at Athr Gallery, touching several topics including the artist's professional career and personal opinions on the significance of art and the prospects for cinema in Saudi Arabia. “I'm proud to be part of the first Saudi art week and I'm optimistic regarding the future of cinema in the Kingdom. We have already reached a good stage with Saudi movies being displayed on online and international platforms. This event's incredible turnout is a sign of people's hunger for art and expression,” said kamel. “The fact that we don't have cinemas is definitely an obstacle but I'm hopeful with the online platform and the fact that Saudi Arabia has many talents testing themselves abroad and/or trying to join strengths in the country. Freedom comes from the inside and expression cannot be stopped when your heart is in it,” she added. According to Kamel the main problem in the Kingdom is that cinema is not understood as a form of art but rather as an entertainment associated to Hollywood productions and TV soap operas. The film industry has instead a long tradition and history that, in her opinion, should be taught in schools and discussed in public talks to help create a culture for it. Talking about her first steps in the cinema industry Kamel said: “I never thought about filmmaking. Filmmaking chose me. I studied animation at college and fell in love with the camera by chance after shooting a movie for my graduation project.” Kamel has come a long way since then. The first Saudi woman to study acting and filmmaking in the US, Kamel worked alongside director Peter Berg on “The Kingdom” (2007) and started to attract the sympathies of the international critic with her acting roles in the Turkish movie “Razn” and Saudi movie “Wadjda” by Saudi Director Haifa Al Mansour. Her recent directorial efforts were no less so. “Sanctity” (2012) is the second short movie after “The Shoemaker” (2009) that she successfully wrote, produced and starred, collecting awards and invitations to several film festivals. “Although honored to represent my country on global platforms, I am aware of the international interest towards my homeland and don't like to carry any banner. I am simply an artist who wants to express herself and happened to be Saudi. I'd like my works to attract attention in light of their artistic quality rather than my nationality,” she said. Influenced by the cinema of the sixties and seventies, fond of great directors such as John Cassavetes, Wong Kar Wai and Giuseppe Tornatore, Kamel likes the idea of adding poetry and symbolism to her works. “I like movies capable of leaving an imprint. Movies that you can't just watch and forget about”. The young director finds inspiration in her personal experiences and the society that surrounds her bringing to the forefront delicate social and women issues. However it is a need for expression rather than social responsibility that motivates her. “I'm just an artist expressing myself. Moving a person in the inside is my aim,” Kamel said. In her movie “Sanctity,” she depicts characters that are representative of the most under-privileged and fragile segments of Saudi society (women, poor migrants). Doing so she partly reconnects with neorealism, an old tradition of cinema that saw its light in Italy after the Second World War. The reality she portrays in Sanctity is not the one of the upper classes mostly represented by Hollywood macro productions, but the everyday life of weak subjects who fight against oppressive social costumes and wish to conquer a certain degree of freedom. The movie tells the story of Areej, a young, poor and pregnant widow, who wants to protect her unborn child. Her brother-in-law wants to marry her and tries to blackmail her, while she shelters a young immigrant in her home. Consequently, she establishes a peculiar friendship with him, within a community that insists on gender segregation. “There is a whole world outside Saudi Arabia that exists without gender segregation. Relations between genders are not focused only on sex”, said Kamel. “The biggest challenge of shooting the movie in Jeddah, a part from all the bureaucracy we had to deal with, was time. We had only seven days to shoot the entire film. Luckily and unexpectedly the people of the neighborhood were extremely supportive”. Moreover, she recalls that the name of the city where the movie is set, Jeddah, is related to the myth of Eve being buried in this location. Jeddah in fact also means “grandmother.” So the movie, she says, is also symbolically about the neglected grandmother and the women of this city. The director asks herself the question: what would a woman do if she didn't have a man in her life? Answering to such question, she represents a woman able to stand up and fight for herself. “If a woman raises a kid, she is also able of taking responsibility for herself,” she said. However, Kamel does not opt for an overly simplified form of morality. The film has an open-end, leaving the viewer in front of his own dilemmas about many important social issues, but without proposing an easy and ready-made morality susceptible of answering such dilemmas. “Sanctity's” next screenings will be this month in Beirut and at the Gulf Film Festival in April.
