Malek Bensmaïl Director of Origines

How did you discover the Far East, an important theme of your next film?

My latest feature China is still far, dealt with childhood and the transfer of knowledge in Algeria mentioning another Far-Eastern country as well. China, a symbolic land in the area of Islam, is a reference to a citation by the Prophet Mohammed inciting Muslims to “seek knowledge, all the way to China if you must.”

My project Origines depicts the encounter of a well-known Algerian actor and a Japanese woman. Historians drew fascinating parallels between the movements of the modern Arab renaissance and the Meiji era in Japan. For my movie, the most valuable aspect is the common history of ‘renaissances’. The current trends of Islamic reform will enable me to build interesting metaphors with the present. One of the historic issues of the film is the broken thread of the Arab-Islamic world’s reform as it is told in Ibrahim, a tale of an Ulama who travelled to Japan at the turn of the last century. My leading characters and the audience encounter those old places, where the cultures of East and West, or tradition and modernity, are again entwined nowadays, and they notice that the questions of yesterday, posed by Ibrahim, are still relevant today.

Why is it worth to bring out the long standing question of the split between East and West in 2011?

People’s desire for the understanding of the Arab-Muslim region and its relationship to the West seems never to have been as strong as today. Since I have been doing research for Origines, I have been able to observe how scarce the audiovisual documentation of this part of the world really is. Motion pictures often confine representation of the area either to terrorism and Islamism, or to the golden age of Islam with Arab arts and sciences. Each of us, on either side of the cultural divide, has only the vision of “the other” that our education has left us, mixed with the information presented by the media. History has its dark areas and injustices, of course, but the news of the media is still exacerbated to the point of encouraging simplistic and/or mythological descriptions that feed a definitely Manichean view of one place or another.

Your previous films, such as Le Grand Jeu (on the Algerian presidential elections in 2004), tend to put history at the forefront…

History is part of our life, but it happens to be only the transmission element. In my other documentary, Alienations, I was confronted for example with the world of madness in Algeria through the predominant issues of identity, religion and language. In ? count with the actual revolutions of the Arab world, I want my new film to be in phase with the modern, living world, like an evidence of the personal and collective renaissance. I believe it is urgent to propose another, tighter, more contemporary key for interpreting the history of the present, but little known, period.

In your opinion, should a filmmaker remain neutral when looking at these sensitive contemporary issues?

Individualism, neo-nationalism and religion should be viewed for the first time through the prism of “non-Western” experiments of modernity. I will endeavor to explore the deeply buried aspects of the modern experience by shifting the focus away from the Western experience to tell the Arab-Muslim one. Since I am an Algerian filmmaker exiled in Europe I claim multiple identities: Algerian, Berber, Arabic, Western, and so on. It is amazing that, though I wasn’t aware of it, I began to create my identity when I began to create my film work, because identity is also a free, perpetual movement of creation.

by Janka Barkoczi