A Tale of Two Filmmakers

Omar Gabriel film still

RUCHI MITAL: You once said something like art is my only refuge. Has that always been the case for you? Did your journey with the camera start when you were young? How did it come about?

OMAR GABRIEL: I realized at a later stage in my life that art has always been my refuge. I think it’s a cliche to say, art heals me, or art allows me to be myself. I don’t think it’s that. You watched my films, and you got to discover a deeper layer of myself. And this deeper layer was not easily accepted, embraced or celebrated, because it’s vulnerable, because it’s not based on: ‘I have achieved this. I have this amount of money. I am a strong man.’ It doesn’t fit into these standards. It’s more like, I’m feeling all these feelings, and that has been, in the course of my life, not celebrated, especially in the younger years when I didn’t have community or like-minded people holding space for each other. I would say it has been my cathartic tool, my way to be curious, to go outside of myself and into myself, and at the same time, it has been my peaceful way to show my rage and to say, ‘This cannot continue.’ Things need to be addressed properly, with depth, with humanity and with soul. I want to dig, dig, dig deep to a place that I don’t even know what it is. I want to enter something somewhere. It’s always never enough for me. I think it’s a problem for me that it’s always never enough. But at the same time, this is how I feel when I’m on an artistic quest.

Omar Gabriel film still

RUCHI MITAL: Do you ever have the feeling that you touched it, the thing you were digging for?

OMAR GABRIEL: I think I’ve touched glimpses of it, and the rest is not touched. This is what keeps me digging. I’m afraid this is a big greedy part, or a part of me that’s always a bit unfulfilled. Not like, ‘I’m not satisfied,’ but more like, ‘Wow, we’re so complex and our stories are so multi-layered, so it will never be enough.’ When I finish any piece, I always feel like I missed a lot of things, and maybe it’s not enough, and I need to search more and dig more, but then it resonates with a lot of people, and they find it so deep and profound, and then I’m like, ‘Ah, okay, I asked for more, but maybe it’s already enough.’

RUCHI MITAL: There can be two parts to it’s not enough. One is, it’s not enough for me, the other is feeling a responsibility toward other people, like I’m taking on telling this story. I have a responsibility. Do you feel that? Do you have a responsibility to someone, some community, some country you carry when you’re making work?

OMAR GABRIEL: So much. I think this is why I also feel it’s not enough. Because I ask myself, ‘How can I, in a short film or feature film, tell the story of one person?’ I must understand what they have been through to be able to communicate it, verbalize it or address it properly. I feel this responsibility that they are giving me a door into their life, into their psyche, into their hearts. I feel so responsible, especially when someone knows what it means to open up, when they are vulnerable and want to be want to feel safe, want to feel appreciated, want to feel celebrated. I always want to push more to make them feel they are being represented in a way they feel good about while sharing things they thought might be too shameful or vulnerable. I want them to see that it resonated with a lot of other people, so they become the heroes of their story, and not the other way around. I think this feeling of it’s not enough comes from I want to touch the core of depth, realness, and authenticity, and I don’t have a reference.

RUCHI MITAL: Let’s talk specifically about your series, A Letter to Myself. I think it brings together so many of the things that you were just talking about. And I wonder if you can tell me a little bit about how this series come about, what drove you to do this series, a little bit about how you connected with the people you featured in the series, and the intention behind the approach that you took. It has the feeling of a home movie, and yet there’s also a kind of timeless quality to it. It could be almost any time period since cameras have been invented. It’s very intimate, but it’s also very universal. It’s experimental in that it’s not just a narrative, with a beginning, middle and end. It’s a really rich series you created. If you can, tell me a little bit about how you came to it and what your idea was.

OMAR GABRIEL: It all started after the Beirut blast, when I was very close to death. I was blessed to stay alive and stay in shape and healthy, and I asked myself, ‘What is my responsibility, since I’m here and what can I do without fear?’ I had been inhabited by the fear of expressing something too real and too authentic. I’ve done this in the past, but not to that extent, and I felt like since I have been so close to that, there’s nothing to be afraid of anymore. I wouldn’t say it’s only about queerness; it’s also about acceptance, and it’s about embracing the inner child and addressing something to oneself, and taking the time to reflect about oneself in a world where we’re always doing things for others.

I am writing a letter to myself, taking the time to write words intuitively with all my heart, not to another person, but to myself. It’s meeting the self that sometimes we don’t have the time for or are afraid to meet. I started with the others, and they inspired me to end it with a letter to myself, because I felt like, ‘Those people are so courageous.’ They are strong enough to write letters to themselves and to accept being filmed and to know that these films are going to go viral on Instagram. So why am I still hiding behind my camera? What I wanted to ask others is what I’m searching for in myself. So, this time, I would not hide behind the camera. The turning point was when I realized that what we’re looking for in others is also what we look for in ourselves.

Omar Gabriel film still

RUCHI MITAL: There’s always this tension in a documentary, this power thing about, I’m looking at you, I’m telling your story. And as much as you are giving someone the opportunity to tell their story, you’re looking at them and making yourself one of the subjects of the series. To me, this seems like a political act, in the framework of Everything is Political. It seems to be related to this thing that happens when you’re a person from a particular community… you’re from Lebanon, you’re a queer person… It’s like you’re now going to speak for this group. If you’re from this country, you can only talk about wars, because that’s what this experience is about, and the multi-layers of complexity somehow are not allowed for. And I don’t know if that’s something you experience, but it feels that in this space of allowing one person to write to themselves and not have to speak to the audience or the world, and putting yourself in it, you’re kind of reclaiming this complexity.

OMAR GABRIEL: I totally agree that it’s a political act to place myself in this. In the beginning, I never thought about it as political. I just felt that intuitively, I felt the need to be in this series. But in terms of hierarchy, somehow it puts us all at the same level, when we are all expressing in the same way. As a filmmaker, I express differently through the camera, through the stories I want to tell, because also others are reflections of me. I don’t choose the people I work with randomly. Maybe it’s an intuitive choice, but deep down, we have things in common, or we have values that are shared in common, or wounds that are shared in common. It’s like a spider’s web; we’re all connected in some way or another.

I have to step back and look at it with consciousness to be able to understand it. We are all part of each other’s stories because we’re all having this human experience, and we go through things that are similar and different, but the things we share are part of this human experience of loss and grief and celebration and identity crisis. I think what is political about it is that we are an inspiration for each other, and by connecting and by opening up and by sharing, we realized that we as human beings have so much in common.

One of the insanely incredible things about this art form is that this specific individual story or life or experience has this power to burst into something universal. One of my favorite parts about making documentaries is the level of surprise you’re always dealing with. You know what it is, and it becomes something else, or it moves in a different direction, and you have to go with it. I think some art forms are inside out, like I have a feeling, or I have an idea, and then I express it. But this one is very much like you’re eating it, and then it’s digested and transformed. I would call it a humbling process. You realize that if you trust life and you trust the people, it can give you a lot more than you know. I would say it removes the control. It removes it’s my idea, it’s my vision.

My short film, Lebanon After the War: Is Healing Possible?, was filmed in the Shatila, Palestinian camps. I was shooting at the same time the genocide was happening and while the war in southern Beirut was going on. I wanted to go to Shatila to see if I could find some joy in this very complex and difficult territory, where Palestinians and other migrants, Syrians and Lebanese were staying. In this intense place, I wanted to search for joy, because the violence is inflicted on us and our bodies and I wanted to understand how it is possible to liberate ourselves while the system is still present and while the oppression is still happening and the war is still ongoing.

I met a dancer named Omar a couple of years ago, and he is from Shatila. I said to him, ‘Let’s do a movie while we try to liberate our bodies.’ And he was like, ‘Yes, great. Where?’ And I said, ‘In Shatila.’ He said, ‘No way. I wouldn’t dare dance in the streets of Shatila.’ I said, ‘I’m with you. Let’s take on this challenge. I don’t think it will be a problem.’ We started to test it out, and then we started celebrating our bodies, and we ended up dancing with this whole community we found in Shatila. I realized that people are here to celebrate joy, to dance, to move, and not to judge, even while they endure political oppression and violence.

As a man from Lebanon dancing with another man in this environment, it wasn’t the most comforting or safe in the beginning. But this was part of the challenge, to feel fear and move with it and see where it took us. Of course, we had some backups for our personal safety, but you can never control everything. We decided to move with fear and see where it guided us. Are you being chased, or is this an expression? And the answer is, it’s both. It really captures both those feelings. It’s all these feelings of wanting to escape what scares you, but also wanting to protect yourself, but also wanting to move to a place where you don’t know where you’re going, you’re just escaping something that has been imposed on you.

Palestinians, Lebanese people, and Syrian people have been living and experiencing for decades violence imposed on us. There’s always something we need to run away from. We need to run away from our home. We need to run away from our belongings, from our family, from our body. We always feel like there’s something that is threatening us. We carry with us all of these traumas.

I don’t have an answer as to how to liberate ourselves from fear, violence, and trauma. It’s still an ongoing journey as a Lebanese person, as a queer person, as a sensitive artist who also feels things in a global way. I don’t only feel my own story, I also connect to the global narrative. I try in my films to explore the possibilities of how we can do that, but I don’t have an answer for it. I just have suggestions, humble, simple, small suggestions.

Omar Gabriel film still

RUCHI MITAL: Perhaps the most political thing you can do in this kind of work is not to close the loop, not to say the end, not to answer the question, because then the danger is it becomes a one-dimensional image, and that image then can easily be used against you. You did a really good job of showing that resilience has a cost, and that it’s not an end to anything. A new story is always beginning.

OMAR GABRIEL: Resilience is sometimes not a choice, but if you haven’t chosen to take your own life, you resist by default. This is what most of us have been experiencing. As you can see in this film, some resist by partying, some resist by putting on makeup and dressing up, and some resist by grieving in their own room and allowing those feelings to rise. There isn’t one proper way of healing to be able to continue, and we don’t have the formula yet. We don’t always have the space and time and luxury to explore and discover, because the day you start healing, there is another trauma that’s inflicted on you and your body and your nervous system. I started figuring out how to process this.

The Western methods of healing don’t apply to us, which is mostly everything is inside you, and you find it inside you, and you heal it inside.

I’m not only wounded, and I’m not only traumatized because of things that are inside me. There are things that are inside me that are coming from outer sources. So, once they stop, things can maybe start getting better, but as long as they are still there, we are figuring out our own healing. We don’t want to turn it into violence, and we don’t want to become the oppressor; we still want to be kind and loving. This is our own way of figuring it out, and, and it’s complex and it’s hard and it’s sad, but we are still going and finding ways, as long as we still can.

RUCHI MITAL: I think that all your films have a space for sadness, but they don’t stay there. They have a space for rage, but they don’t stay there. Maybe especially for men, but for a lot of us, sadness isn’t really allowed, because on one hand, you should be grateful for what you have, you’re here, you’re doing these things… I think a space for sadness is revolutionary in and of itself.

OMAR GABRIEL: Thinking that way, that if you are grateful, you should not be sad is imposing a binary way of thinking. You can grieve and still feel sad and still feel joy and still want to feel joy and still mourn and be depressed and get anxious. This is why I refuse to stick to one facet of life, or to one facet of our psyche. I want it to be complex because it is complex. You know, grieving is not linear, and it’s not rigid. It includes so many layers. I am curious about how people can still find their life force amidst all of what’s going on. And I think people like us—Arabs, Lebanese, Palestinians, Syrian—should become the reference for how to find a life force and continue. We should have our own healing systems that we teach others, or we should show others how we can continue, because it’s honestly extremely impressive. And even me, as a Lebanese, I’m still impressed, even if I’m not impressed by myself, I’m impressed by a lot of people in Lebanon and Syria and Palestine. When I see Gaza and people are carrying a life force to continue, I’m curious to know how. I want to learn from those people. I want to learn from my community. I want to learn from the human beings around me.

I want people around me, my neighbors, to tell me how they survived civil war and so many wars, and the explosion and their own personal journey. I’m impressed by the people around me. And I think this is why, with my camera, I don’t search far. I don’t want to travel to find this amazing story. All the people around me and around us have amazing stories.

Omar Gabriel film still

RUCHI MITAL: Are you working on a film right now?

OMAR GABRIEL: I’m finishing my feature film, my personal feature film called Album, which is going to be, hopefully, distributed this year in festivals. It’s about the life of three queer people in Lebanon and their relationships with their mothers, told through archival images that they find in photo albums. It’s a reflection of their childhood but it’s also about questioning the present time and hoping for something in the future.