“I have always been a hopeful person. But now… I have a deep sense of absurdity and meaninglessness.” Director Mohammad Rasoulof (of the Oscar-nominated The Seed of the Sacred Fig2024) visibly has difficulty getting the words out at the premiere of his film in the Oude Luxor.
He recently fled Iran – on foot, over the mountains – to avoid an eight-year prison sentence. Now he’s here, while there Tens of thousands of people may have been murdered in recent weeks. Guilt, anger, displacement – he tries to untangle that tangle in the impressive short film Sense of Waternow at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Although he also says at the press conference: “There are things that are more important than words. And feelings. Like what is happening in my country now.” There are tears from both the audience and the filmmaker.
The first films of the Displacement Film Fund (DFF), which was launched last year, premiered on Friday – five ‘displaced filmmakers’ each received 100,000 euros for a short film. And Rasoulof’s speech was certainly not the only moment of great emotion on the day.
The other films also sent journalists sobbing from the press screenings in the afternoon. An upset press officer hugged Rasoulof. And the walk from the cinema hall to the press conference in the Fenix migration museum had something of a funeral procession.
At the premiere, filmmakers embraced each other, in the spotlight, with minutes of applause. You even forgot that world star and initiator Cate Blanchett was standing on stage next to the emotional directors. And that the evening was opened by the world-famous American poet Amanda Gorman, with a reading of her poem ‘Call us what we carry’: “We walk into tomorrow, carrying nothing but the world.” The premiere ran about an hour late, no one intervened.
Cate Blanchett
This was the first batch of the DFF, co-created in 2023 by “our fearless leader” Cate Blanchett (as she was consistently called), at the Global Refugee Forum. Very quickly, one year after Blanchett’s announcement at the IFFR, five short films have now been made. Projects that challenge our “stigmas” and “misunderstandings”, says Blanchett at the press conference. Because: “We all run the risk of becoming ‘displaced’ from our morality.” Movie: Come Save Us!
It is more than well-intentioned promotional language. The five films are impressive and insightful, especially as a collection. Escaping is not an unambiguous experience, but complicated, paradoxical, sometimes funny.
Two films contain enormous anger. Rasoulof’s film is the best. In Sense of Water a refugee Iranian writer tries to master German. He understands the words, but there are no feelings attached to them, as he has with Farsi. In the meantime he wants to return to Iran; reports of executions stir up an unstoppable rage. Also the expressive Rotationby the Ukrainian Maryna Er Gorbach, contains that anger. An ex-soldier relives her traumas in the sunset in a grain field. You don’t see her memories, but you do see the emotion that swells through her body. An atomic bomb falls in the background. Er Gorbach filmed on reels that were produced in a destroyed Ukrainian city – you can see damage on the reel.
Still from ‘Allies in Exile’ by Hasan Kattan.
These are films that are close to tragedy – by makers who recently fled. Other films contain more distance. Allies in Exile is about trauma processing. In 2016, Hassan and Fadi fled Aleppo. Now they are stuck in London, in a crack among the faceless bureaucracies; two boxes of papers being pushed back and forth between Syria, Turkey and the United Kingdom. In the silent waiting, memories finally bubble up – depicted with material that the two have recorded since 2011. Fadi lost his entire family to the earthquakes of 2023. Hassan’s family is in Turkey and is not allowed to come over – eventually they too are separated by a bureaucracy.
Phases of displacement
“There are different phases of displacement,” says Somali-Austrian filmmaker Mo Harawe after the press screening. “Rasoulof is at the beginning of the process, he has only just been ‘displaced’. But when you are displaced for longer, you come to a kind of acceptance. Then you realize that you don’t have to belong anywhere. Then your film does not have to be about geographical displacement.” In Harawe’s film, a Somali man is on trial for fraud. He married a woman with dementia forty years his senior and sold her lands. But wasn’t that an act of true love?
Super Afghan Gym is the only comedy: Afghan women help each other lose weight in a men’s gym in patriarchal Afghanistan. Director Shahrbanoo Sadat says she felt displaced several times: when she experienced brutal racism as an Afghan in Iran, when she fled Afghanistan when the Taliban seized power, but also as a woman in a patriarchal society and even in her own body. “Now I see identity as something projected onto me,” she says. “I don’t belong anywhere.” That’s why she made her film about a different kind of displacement: that of a woman in a patriarchal Afghanistan, and that of a person in a body. She mixed stories from gyms in Iran and Afghanistan. The men’s gym opened for one hour a day for women, who then worked out quickly and often secretly amid photos of oiled-up bodybuilders – the only bright spot in their day, according to Sadat.
Still from ‘Super Afghan Gym’ by Shahrbanoo Sadat
Therapy
For the filmmakers, making these films was a form of therapy, several of them say. The emotional premiere day in the Old Luxor is the last session. “I used to be ashamed that I had fled,” says Hassan Kattan on stage. “Now I am proud to be a refugee.”
The big question after the premiere is what happens next with the films. Short films are difficult to get into mainstream cinema. Co-initiator and film producer Koji Yanai says they will do their best to distribute the films. Separately, and as a bundle. The latter is to be hoped – some films do not do justice when cut loose. Together they offer a complete picture of the melancholy, despair and absurdity of fleeing, and also of what was lost forever during the journey. A second series of DFF films is already in production for the 2027 IFFR.
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