Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 205: Film and the Political — with Nadia Shihab
Speakers: Debbie C, Am Johal, Nadia Shihab
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Debbie C 0:04
Hello listeners, I'm Debbie C with Below the Radar, and knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of Below the Radar, our host, Am Johal, is joined by Nadia Shihab, an artist, filmmaker and assistant professor at SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts. Together, Nadia and Am explore her path into filmmaking and the meanings behind some of her past films like, I Come from Iraq, Amal’s Garden, and Jaddoland, we hope you enjoy the episode.
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Am Johal 0:46
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar. Delighted that you could join us again this week. We have a special guest with us today, Nadia Shihab, who's a new faculty member at Simon Fraser University. Welcome, Nadia.
Nadia Shihab 1:00
Thank you.
Am Johal 1:05
Nadia, I wonder if we can start with you introducing yourself a little bit.
Nadia Shihab 1:05
Sure. So my name is Nadia Shihab, I'm a filmmaker and artist. Grew up in Texas, and I'm a filmmaker and artist.
Am Johal 1:15
Nadia, I know that you've come into the film department, at the School [of Contemporary Arts, but wondering if you could speak to what got you started in making films?
Nadia Shihab 1:24
Yeah, so I actually got started quite a long time ago, I was in my early 20s. And pretty active politically on campus at the University of Texas at Austin, where I was at school. September 11th, had just happened. And prior to that I was pretty involved in organizing against the economic sanctions in Iraq, which is where my family was from. And when September 11th happened, I got fairly involved in organizing, which felt like the thing that I needed to do and was very satisfying, in many ways because it gave me an outlet to channel a lot of the things I was feeling at the time, and a lot of my frustrations.
But after some time of doing that, I began to notice, first of all, that we were organizing against the war in Iraq, and yet I was the only Iraqi person within that large community. And I began to feel that some of the questions I was having, and feelings I was having, that the kind of aesthetic of organizing there wasn't really a place for me to explore some of those questions in more nuanced ways, or in more personal ways. And at the same time, I began to feel a great sense of loss around what was happening in my home country, and also with the Arab American and Muslim community in the US. And against that loss, I felt like I needed to make a record of something that was very precarious. And so I began I wasn't a film student, I was studying Sociology. But I was able to meet with this filmmaker, Anne Lewis, who is also a labour organizer, who had done a lot of work in Appalachia and with working-class communities. And she allowed me to sit in on her film class, to sit in on her editing class. And she mentored me in making my first film. So that was how I got into filmmaking. And after that, actually, I took a very long break, because I realized, it took a lot out of me emotionally. And I thought, like, 'Oh, this is actually really hard. I don't know if I want to keep doing this.'
Am Johal 3:23
That film was I Come from Iraq?
Nadia Shihab 3:25
It was.
Am Johal 3:26
Can you talk a little bit about that process of making that first work?
Nadia Shihab 3:31
Yeah. So my grandparents had come to Canada, to Toronto, as refugees soon after the first Gulf War in 1991. They came, I believe, in 1993. And soon after they came, we began to visit them every summer. And during those times, I think I was in my teen years, and I was kind of bearing witness to the struggles they were going through, as you know, new immigrants to a country. And when the US began to ramp up on its war, its second war in Iraq after September 11th. As I mentioned, I was thinking about how to try to be engaged with the moment, but not necessarily in the streets, but perhaps in a more personal way with my family. So I went to Canada and spent some time with them during the week that we invaded Iraq, and watched them, as they kind of watched the invasion of their homeland through their television screen. And I just filmed with them, and spent time with them. And in between them watching the news. And the news was on 24/7. I also asked them a lot about their lives and their history. So it became a kind of oral history. You know, I made this film so long ago, that sometimes it's like, hard to remember what was happening at the time, or what transpired.
Am Johal 4:41
You know, it's interesting when you mentioned that time for me, because I just remember the politics of it so vividly. I'd spent a year living in Haifa, in the Middle East, working with a human rights organization, and coming back into Canada and just seeing how it was being – the war was being read in different ways. And of course, the 2004 US election, of course, being in Texas, where George Bush had been Governor, can you speak a little bit to the campus politics of the time? In particular, being in Texas [which] had a particular orientation to it as well, in that time.
Nadia Shihab 5:14
Yeah, definitely. I mean, first of all, the University of Texas is the largest university in the US. There were, I think, 50,000 students. Public, very affordable. And yet the communities of students that were politically vocal on that campus was very small. I think something that was very, I know, very transformative for me was being able to find community with people whose politics aligned with mine. But it was also very difficult. I'd say that we burnt out quite quickly. Because when you're on a campus that large 50,000 students, in a very conservative state. It was a time. And it's funny now, but it was a time when we still were relying on mainstream news to share our story. Like we organized a massive walkout on this campus of 50,000 students. And then we were hoping that the newspapers would cover it. Now, I think we're in a different place in terms of how we are able to kind of communicate and share stories. But I remember feeling kind of disillusioned at a certain point. So there was a lot of community, and a lot of energy, but it was also very challenging.
Am Johal 6:14
So you took some time, away from filmmaking for a while, but you later on made a work, Amal’s Garden, wondering if you could speak about that?
Nadia Shihab 6:24
Yes, after I completed my undergraduate studies, I took some time to – you know, making the film I Come from Iraq made me want to learn my, my mother's native tongue, which is Turkmeni, which is the language of the ethnic Turkmen in northern Iraq. And it's a language that is very similar to the Turkish in Turkey. But because of the politics of Iraq, it's a language that was no longer allowed to be taught in school or published in newspapers. So it's been passed down orally within my family. So my mother and her siblings speak it among each other, but none of them know how to read or write it. And it became important for me to learn that language, unfortunately, I couldn't go to Iraq. So I went to Turkey. And I ended up spending two years in Turkey doing a mix of teaching, of doing research, I got a Fulbright grant to work in southeast Turkey among the Kurdish communities. And then I came back to the US and became very interested in urban space. And I guess, the politics of urban space, and the ways that power is produced, in ways that are seen and unseen. So I eventually attended the University of California, Berkeley, to study City and Regional Planning. This whole time, I'm not making films, I'm just interested in learning. And I completed that degree, it was a two-year program. And then I worked in community development, affordable housing, I worked for about 10 years in the Bay Area on issues related to city planning and affordable housing.
But soon after I began that work, I realized that there were some things I needed to explore outside of that job in a creative way. So I kind of began a creative practice, again, in filmmaking. And around that time, I was thinking a lot about the relatives — by this time, you know, our family is pretty scattered after the Gulf War, they're in Sweden, they're in Turkey. They're in Canada, the US. But there was a couple, my great aunt and uncle, that had chosen to stay in Iraq. And I was really interested in them, and what their life was like and what had changed since the war. So I went to visit them. And I made a short film about it, called Amal's Garden.
So because I had been studying urban planning, I was really interested in the politics of the city that they were living in Kirkuk. Which is kind of on the edge of, by this point it was a region that was largely Kurdish. And they were from the Turkmen minority now in that city, which used to be a majority. And I was kind of interested in the politics around that and how their city had changed. And when I arrived in their home, I was immediately confronted with this renovation project that my aunt had chosen to do, because it had been so many years since they could renovate their home because of the war. So I arrived, and there was hammering, and there were sawing, and it was a terrible sound environment to make a film. But then very quickly, I began to notice the rhythms that were emerging, just in the few hours I was spending there. Her directing the workers, my uncle going to the garden and singing songs, the electricity going in and out every few hours. And so those rhythms of daily life came to form the structural backbone of the film called Amal's Garden.
Am Johal 9:33
You’ve continued to make work, there's a project you did called 57 Manchester.
Nadia Shihab 9:39
Yeah, I'd say 57 Manchester was a film, it was my first experiment with analog film shooting in Super Eight. In collaboration with my partner, Mark, who's also a musician. And it's a project that's very different than my other work, I'd say. But what connects it is that there's something about it that's quite personal, and that’s situated in domestic space. Almost all my films have been set within a home or around a home. Yeah, it was a film that we had a lot of fun having. And I like to think that even from my films that are pretty weighty in terms of subject matter, I incorporate a lot of play into my work. And so that was a project that was very playful.
Am Johal 10:16
What is it about the interior or idea of home space that you find interesting, in terms of entering into a subject matter, or making a work that's special for you?
Nadia Shihab 9:39
That's a good question. I think that there's an intimacy there that's built-in. There's a constraint that's built-in, that can be quite helpful. You know, I'd also say that I – or add that I never intended for any of my films to have that constraint, but because I've tended to work in ways that are quite personal and in collaboration with my family. That tends to be the place where the stories are.
Am Johal 10:51
Before I ask you about some of your other films, I wanted to ask you about your urban planning background and your work in issues of urbanism— sort of, what drew you to that, and also what from that period of your work inform some of your practices now, or the subject matters that you're dealing with?
Nadia Shihab 11:12
When I was living abroad, I think there's something about changing your environment radically. So that when you do come back to the environment that you're in, you see all these things that you didn't see before. And I think that was definitely the case living in Turkey for two years. And I was living there alone, I didn't know many people. And so I ended up befriending a lot of working-class people, like the man that you know, sold tea in the neighborhood, or the worker at the local vegetable market. And there was something about that, where when I came back to Texas, I suddenly saw many communities that were somehow invisible to me before. And I began to see the ways in which my own hometown, Lubbock, Texas, the ways in which the development in that city was incredibly racist, and the ways in which, freeways had gone through the African American communities, the latino communities, and it somehow all these things that were invisible to me before, became visible. And I'd say that sometimes it's hard for me to explicitly draw the connection between city planning and filmmaking, because these are pursuits that kind of happened in parallel and, and weren't really often happening at the same time. But I think there is something about the unseen. That is very interesting to me, whether it's about power, or relationality, that continues to be of interest to me, you know, that which is outside of the frame.
Am Johal 12:36
I want to ask you about your film, Jaddoland, where that project started?
Nadia Shihab 12:41
By this point I was living in California, in the Bay Area. And every summer, I would go back to Texas to visit my mother, who had been there at this point for 30 years. She's originally from Iraq, but she was an educator at the local university, and also a painter. And I noticed that she was working on these series of large paintings that were using the landscape of Texas and Iraq interchangeably. So I would see a painting and it would sort of look like Texas, but I would know that it was the landscape of Iraq, or vice versa. And it was interesting to me that nobody else would know this. But I knew this. And also, I was just thinking about that, about these invisible threads of longing, that she still had to a place that was no longer her home. But that was still somehow a part of her. Because she left Iraq when she was eight, and then lived in Lebanon, and then eventually New York, and then eventually, Texas. So that was the scene of the film. And with that film in particular, it was a film that I didn't have a clear synopsis for. You know, when I started, I just began to shoot in this very generative way. Every time I went home, I would shoot and then I would spend six months looking at the material, looking at the images, and trying to understand what they meant. And then based on that, I would go back and shoot some more. So it came together very organically. And eventually, it became a film that connects her creative process with my own creative process to explore the meaning of home, and how that changes across generations.
Am Johal 14:09
Fascinating, I really want to see it. And Echolocation is a more recent film. Yeah? Speak to that.
Nadia Shihab 13:31
Yeah. So with Echolocation, I— my family was going through a very difficult period, my brother was quite sick. And it was a time when it didn't really feel like it made sense to be making anything. And instead, I was cutting things up, I was cutting photographs and textiles into fragments and pieces, and then rearranging them and kind of working with collage. And I went home again to visit my mother, which I always often do. And I found this box of photographs. And I found these photographs that she had taken in her own mother's home, in Baghdad, in 1985. That were the kind of photographs where you take a photo and then move a little and take a photo and then eventually you tape them all together. So they were also these, they seemed to me like collages, taking these fragments and making them into a larger whole. It felt to me like she was trying to make a record of her mother's home. And she kind of photographed every inch of it. And I was really interested in that. And there was one photo in particular, that– there was something about it that resonated with me. There isn't much in the image except you see some feet when you have some ankles on a pillow and there's a sofa, there's a small TV, and I sent that image to my aunts and uncles on WhatsApp and I asked them, does this image bring up anything for you? And they sent me all these voice messages. And that became I'm still opening chapter to Echolocation. Which is a film that uses fragments to explore existence and the aftermath of change, I guess, or loss. And the film moves, it progresses, it's probably the most experimental of all my work. And I was also, you know, not interested in making something that was entirely legible, I was really interested in conveying a feeling and hoping that that feeling was communicated. But it's a film that begins with the past, moves into the present, and then goes into the future. But stitched together entirely with still images and voice recordings and field recordings.
Am Johal 16:22
|In the form of filmmaking, the various kind of aesthetic approaches that one can take, what are you most interested in pursuing aesthetically now? There's obviously linear forms of doing documentary, but you've practiced in so many different ways to get at your subject matter. And wondering – there's so many different ways of telling a story, and what interests you in the filmmaking now, in terms of your own evolution as a filmmaker?
Nadia Shihab 16:50
I think at this moment in time, I'm interested in being able to explore that which is quite personal, but in a way that can be accessible and universal. And I'm interested in mystery these days, and creating a work that feels full of mystery. And yet is not alienating to the viewer, or to the audience. You know, there's a lot of film in the avant–garde world, and the art-house world that is not that accessible to a lot of people. So I think of my parents or I’m interested in making work. And I think it's quite hard, making a kind of film that can be that can have entry points for many different kinds of people. I don't think that's very easy to do. I'd say I'm still interested in work that's very female driven, in the sense of who we're seeing on screen. And also interested in the mature woman, the kind of woman that we don't often see on screen. It's pretty vague. But I also like being able to grow and change and evolve my style, and not feel like I have to keep making films in a certain style. When I look back now at I Come from Iraq, and Amal's Garden, Jaddoland, I realized that they are a kind of trilogy of work that belongs together. And I think that the work I continue to make will connect to that. But also, I hope be quite different as well.
Am Johal 18:20
Wondering [of] other filmmakers who have influenced your work, like whose work have you been inspired by?
Nadia Shihab 18:27
I've been inspired by many artists over a long period of time, and oftentimes, my work will reflect who I'm watching at the time. So you know, when I made I Come from Iraq, I think I was watching Frederick Wiseman. And then when I began making Jaddoland, I was watching a lot of Chantal Akerman. I love Elia Suleiman, you mentioned him earlier, he's amazing. And then I get inspired to buy random short films that I see. So I don't feel like I have a predominant influence. But always open to seeing new work, and also rediscovering older artists.
Am Johal 19:06
I'm wondering — I know that you've got other film projects on the go. But wondering if you could speak a little bit to what are some projects that are unrealized, or you haven't yet had time to pursue. Of course, you're busy being a professor now as well. So it's hard to have the time to continue to make work, but I'm sure that you'll find a way. But wondering if you can speak to some ideas that you have about future projects.
Nadia Shihab 19:34
I'm very interested in collaborating. I have an aunt who's a filmmaker who lives in Beirut. And I'm really interested in kind of an intergenerational collaboration, we do send voice messages to each other back and forth. And so that's– I think that's like loosely one thing that I'm interested in. Especially because as I mentioned earlier, the language that my aunties and uncles speak, that's a language that I'm not really fluent in it my daughter who's four years old, she doesn't speak it. And there's something that feels important to me to preserve that or make a record through a kind of creative collaboration. I've been creating, like my most recent project, which is still in postproduction is In a Space of Hybridity, kind of between something that seemingly feels documentary or fiction, and that's been a really fun space to work in.
Am Johal 20:27
Wondering if you could think about the way that you were in your undergrad making your first film– and of course there'll be a number of students who will be listening to this interview– what advice you would have, for somebody, say, working on a tiny budget, but having an idea to make a work to put out there. What are things that you share with your students? So your advice [for] someone who really has the passion to make a work, but not necessarily the training or the budget.
Nadia Shihab 20:56
I would just say that we all have to start somewhere. And just begin as best as you can with whatever limited resources you have. Though we can even shoot on our iPhones these days. I think it can be empowering to embrace imperfections, and to create constraints for ourself as well. Whether that's in terms of the length of a film, you know, creating a three minute film. Or constraining ourselves to a particular place when we film. Those things I found useful in my own work, deadlines are also really helpful. So anyway that one can kind of build in deadlines, make yourself accountable to someone else, I find can be quite helpful. Because it's very easy in the editing suite to just keep editing and keep editing, or now you know, keep shooting.
Am Johal 21:45
Nadia, is there anything you'd you'd like to add?
Nadia Shihab 21:48
Thank you for having me. I appreciate the chance to talk.
Am Johal 21:51
Thank you for joining us on Below the Radar.
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Debbie C 21:59
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to this episode with Nadia Shihab. To learn more about Nadia's past films, check out the show notes below. Make sure to follow us on Twitter at sfu_voce to stay up to date on our newest podcast releases. Thanks again for tuning in, and we’ll see you next time on Below the Radar.
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