São Paulo – Karim Aïnouz’s films are a journey through deeply personal stories and revolutionary characters. The director, who was born in Brazil’s Northeastern state of Ceará, recorded his first trip to his father’s country Algeria in Mariner of the Mountains, which is perhaps his most intimate film to date. There he meets his family in Kabylia, a village in the mountains where the Aïnouz came from, and learns more about their history, which is part of his identity. The film was shot in early 2019 when the Algerian people were protesting against a fifth term for then-president Bouteflika. The director felt the need to show these demonstrations in Algiers and did so through the eyes of Nardjes A., a young Algerian activist who is the namesake of the documentary. Both films premiere Thursday (28) in Brazil.
In an interview with ANBA at a hotel in São Paulo, Karim Aïnouz spoke of delving into his roots and the history of revolutions in Algeria, which led to the two productions, Firebrand which is his first international fictional feature film and contended for the Palme d’Or in Cannes this year and is expected to premiere in Brazil in January 2024, and future projects.
This interview contains spoilers.
Karim Aïnouz was born in Fortaleza, the capital city of Ceará. His mother Iracema met Majid Aïnouz in the United States in the 70s when she was studying at a university there. However, Majid returned to Algeria to fight for independence, and Karim only met him at age 15 in Paris.
Mariner of the Mountains, Karim Aïnouz said, is a film that’s connected to his 2009 feature film I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You. “And to my first short film, too, Seams, which is on YouTube. It’s a film I made for my grandmother. I didn’t think I wanted to make films. I just wanted to record my beloved grandmother Branca,” he said.
The director decided to visit his country of origin on his own. “I’d always thought I wanted to go on this trip with my father for him to show me Algeria, to discover the country through his eyes, but he had never invited me to go there,” he said. After divorcing Karim’s mother, Iracema, Majid married an Algerian woman and built a new family there.
Karim Aïnouz planned the trip, the project, got a budget, and called his father the day before leaving, letting him know he was going to Algiers. His father even went to the Algerian capital to meet him, but Karim Aïnouz said he only turned on the camera after his father left and returned to Paris, where he lives to this day.
“When I got there, I understood I really wanted to make that trip alone. I didn’t want to see it through his eyes because I thought if I wanted to do it that way, I could have gone with him when I was still a boy, so I thought it was very important to discover that place by myself,” he said.
Read more on this interview with Karim Aïnouz in 2019
Letter to his mother
The travel diary is narrated by Aïnouz as if he were telling the story to his mother Iracema. “I understood it was a trip I had taken not only to find out where my father, grandfather and my family name come from but a trip I wanted to take with my mother and we didn’t, so I thought it would be more powerful both personally and dramaturgically if it was her I told about this trip to, after all she was the one I wanted to tell about it to. She was curious about this place that she never got to go. It was expensive and complex to go to Algeria. It was very difficult, after she returned to Brazil, to raise me alone, and when I got there, I realized,” he said.
Tribute to grandfather Idir
For Aïnouz, at that moment, it became clear that this was not a film about his father but his family’s political legacy. “I had a much closer relationship with my grandfather than my father. My grandfather left for Paris; it was a very cruel life. He fought for twenty years for [Algeria’s] independence, and when the first revolutionary government came into power, he was part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Then there was a coup within his own party, and he was exiled, so it was a very sad thing,” he said.
He recalled when his grandfather Idir died in 2004 in Paris. Karim already lived in Germany. “I got the call and went to Paris for his funeral, and I remember, in the cemetery where he was being buried [thinking]: All my grandfather didn’t want was to be buried in France. Maybe it was much more of a journey to discover who my grandfather was, what he did during the war, what he did during the revolution, than about my father,” he said.
Karim left Fortaleza for Paris, France, in 1985, where he lived with his father for two years. “I met my grandfather before I met my father. I thought my father lived in Algeria and my grandfather lived in Paris. Then I met my grandfather; he was the one who introduced me to my father, and my relationship with my grandfather was much better than with my father. And I’ll confess something to you, […] I think for my father, it was all very difficult, and with my grandfather, I learned a lot more about Algeria, so it was very nice to meet this brother of his, my great-uncle [who appears in Mariner of the Mountains], and he tells me about my grandfather things that he… I think anyone who has been through war doesn’t want to talk about war, right? So what I knew about my grandfather was a little idyllic about Algeria, the mountain, and Kabylia, so for me, it was much more about finding where my grandfather and grandmother came from than about my father,” he said.
In Mariner of the Mountains, Karim Aïnouz finds a namesake on the way, and when he reaches Kabylia, he finds an Aïnouz community there. “It was crazy, it was insane, the moment of getting in the graveyard. As I remember that when I was raised in Fortaleza, our first house was next to a graveyard, and it was a place where many people used to go, so it wasn’t a taboo or anything. [Our house] was 300 meters from the graveyard, and there wasn’t anyone named Aïnouz there, since there were only previous generations of my mom’s [family],” he recalled.
In the cemetery of Kabylia, Aïnouz saw his family name and better understood the historical and permanence bearings of that place, although it didn’t saw a very large migration. “It was profound to understand that that people really had they roots there, that they were ancient roots, even after the centuries and centuries that they have been in that place,” he said.
The filmmaker found in Kabylia a time-old old full of mythology and the history of a people that fought the French colonization. “There you have peoples from North Africa, the Berbers, who underwent several invasions – by the Phoenicians, the Romans, then the Ottomans who lingered there, and then came the Arabs. So the peoples that used to live on the flats fled to the mountain peaks as it was very hard to get there. This was beautiful to found out. And there’re the Kabyle, the Arabs – it’s all mixed up there. Of course, they’re different ethnicities but very similar to each other. For me it was also revealing to learn where this people came from, their history,” he said.
During the filming, Aïnouz read Berber tales that show the Kabyle mythology, which is not Muslim. “They were animists, so there’s a very interesting thing about the fantastic tales. The story I mention towards the end [of Mariner] about Ines is greatly inspired by a tale I was reading at the time. They’re really folktales of the Berber mythology, that lore of the foundation of the world. These were all things I learned when I was there. So it was very impressive to really discover this universe which I hadn’t any idea of,” he said. Ines is a young woman who Aïnouz meet in Kabylia.
The filmmaker said he didn’t see himself as an Algerian during the trip. “Actually no [I didn’t] because I’m much more Cearense than anything else. Maybe I’m many more things than an Algerian, but I believe this is a very beautiful story that even if I feel that I don’t belong, I want to be embraced by them, as it’s very rich,” he said.
Nardjes A.
The idea was first to make a film during his trip to Algeria. “I went there to make the Mariner [of the Mountains], and when I got there, I tried to understand it. I went after my father, my grandfather, and I tried to better understand the political history of that country, which has a remarkable history which I’m a result of but knew very little about. I was really obsessed with the revolution, the [Algerian] War of Independence, the emancipation from the colonial rule… In short, I believe the Mariner is much more a film on the consequences of and the reaction to colonialism than anything else. I’m there, my father is there, my grandfather is there, my story is there, but I believe the major topic of the film is the portrayal of a country that has freed itself from a very cruel colonial power,” he said.
When he got to Argel, Aïnouz looked at his past, to the war in the 50s that culminated in the country’s independence in 1962. By the end of his second week in Argel in February 2019, there was a throng in the streets fighting against the running administration. “I was very stricken, because I caught myself daydreaming, what if it was in Brazil?”, he said.
Women and a reckoning
Aïnouz started then to film the streets that were taken by the green, white and red flag of the country. “I also began to understand that it was very hard to film women for the Mariner, as the Muslim public space is very male-dominated, very patriarchal. And I hadn’t access to female characters, and I realized that those manifestations had many women on the streets, because women played a key role in the [Algerian] War of Independence. There was huge presence of women in the War of Independence (in1958),” he said.
So the filmmaker had the idea to film the demonstrations from the perspective of a female character. “I got really excited about filming those manifestations. I thought with myself, I have to film these from a female perspective, like a reckoning for the Mariner, he said.
He contacted a friend with a casting agency that used to cast Algerian actresses and actors, as he believed it was important to have someone who were acquainted to the camera. The idea was to follow a demonstrator during a whole day in one of these protests, coincidentally on the International Women’s Day on March 8, 2019.
“I met and was utterly captivated by Nardjes, who had something that remind me of the fire of my mother, a certain irreverence, a certain anger, and on the other hand, she told me something that was really charming. She said to me, ‘I’ll let you film me. I go to the protests every single weekend. This is the third manifestation. It’s dangerous, and we could be arrested, but I’d love to document that. But I won’t act for you – you’ll film the activist Nardjes,’” Aïnouz recalled.
The director filmed the manifestation without actually knowing it would become a film. “That for me was a material that would make me happy to see it later, as it was so full of hope. Then after I started editing the Mariner, I understood that may be that was its sister film,” he said.
First Karim Aïnouz tried to fit the manifestations into the montage of Mariner. “I tried many times. And you’ll notice that there’s a moment in the Mariner towards the end that there’s a writing in Arabic that says, ‘The Revolution is Forever’ or ‘The Revolution Shall Prevail’ and the sounds are from Nardjes A., so for many months, there was a part of that that was an integral part of Mariner, from when I arrived [in Argel] and found that revolution,” he said.
More elegant, more productive, and more effective
“I just thought it was too much to handle, and it would be more elegant, more productive, and more effective if they were two distinct objects. So I made the Mariner, and still had a lot of material there. And one thing is important to say is that Nardjes was filmed in 2019 and screened at [German festival] Berlinale in 2020. I believe one of the reasons why I made Nardjes was precisely to talk more about something I knew very little of. Very little was said about what was happening, about these insurrections that were taking place in Argel. So it was very lovely to be able to screen this movie at Berlinale and shed some light on that. [Nardjes] was screened in Germany. So for me it was almost an issue of somewhat unravelling something very relevant that was happening and wasn’t being documented,” he said.
Aïnouz and Nardjes became good friends, and he told this reporter that he had talked to her a week earlier and was going to Argel later this week for the premier of Mariner, and he would take the opportunity to meet her. The director feels like he has another movie to make there, now a fictional one.
“I’m very eager to make [another] movie [in Algeria], something like a science fiction on the desert. There’s a story I’m developing, a project that I’m currently fascinated with, about some nuclear experiments that France did in the desert [of Algeria] in the 60s that were even bigger than Hiroshima. What France did on the desert is unbelievable, and nobody talks about that, so I really want to make a movie about it,” he said on his future plans.
Nardjes A. draws attention besides the political aspects for breaking stereotypes of the Arab Muslim woman. The activist is short-haired, go out dancing, does theater, don’t wear a veil. “This was so big because these Arab women are those who fought the post-colonial independence wars. There was a whole section of the National Liberation Front that was a female army. And Nardjes is the granddaughter of one of those women. She is not only a moder, contemporary, empowered women but also the granddaughter of a female activist. And I believe the greatest thing about making the Mariner, about making Nardjes is this. There’s a story that we have to unveil, to shed light one, and it’s really beautiful to see the women who took up arms to fight the French army in the 60s in Algeria. It’s really impressive, and it happened across the Arab world, in Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco…,” he said.
His first international fictional feature film
In Cannes last May, Karim Aïnouz premiered Firebrand, his first international fictional feature filme, which is expected to premiere in Brazil in January. The film is starred by UK actor Jude Law and Swedish actress Alicia Vikander and recounts the last few months of life of UK queen Catherine Parr. The film was nominated for the Palme d’Or. He told ANBA how this project had started.
Karim Aïnouz, Alicia Vikander, and Jude Law at the premiere of Firebrand in Cannes
“When the making of Invisible Life ended, the Brazilian cinema was cut short by what happened in politics [in 2019], and a marvelous English producer sought me. I needed to work and went after the projects on the market. I found her, and she offered me the story of this queen, who was a revolutionary despite being a queen, and I asked her, ‘why do you want me to do that? I have nothing whatsoever to do with her, it was 500 years ago.’ And she said, ‘because I believe she has the DNA of your female characters.’ And she really had […] something about resistance, about political change. I believe what she did was very radical from the political perspective, and that’s how I fell in love with Catherine Parr, and the project rolled out. So during the pandemic, I edited the Mariner and studied the life of Catherine Parr, to better understand if this intuition I had about her really made sense, and that’s how Firebrand came into being. The movie is based on a book, and we wrote the script and changed it so that it would focus specifically on her last months of life,” he said.
Aïnouz talked about his experience working with Hollywood actors. “You know what was really nice? They’re all people. What happens is that they are very well known. There’s a whole industry there. Jude Law isn’t a star because he has the industry, but the industry makes him a bigger star, and the same goes with Alicia Vikander. So it was very nice to work in an environment that will have a global visibility from the start because the whole world knows who they are. And they are very experienced actors, too, so I believe this is always a present for a director. And I am not talking just about the two of them, but the whole cast of Firebrand that’s a classically trained British cast with a very beautiful, very rich history, so it was fun. Sometimes it was hard because a star is a star, and there are moments they believe themselves to be the most important thing in the world, but I believe that the director-actor relationship reaches a cruising speed when there’s confidence on both sides. It was really good,” he said.
He also mentioned the experience of filming a historical drama. “We’re afraid to make historical films in Brazil, so it was good to learn it. I believe it is no wonder there’s such a mythos around the British monarchy. A part of this is thanks to the cinema. So many films have been made. Therefore, it was great to learn how to do it so that we can make a series of movies that talk about our history in Brazil,” he finished.
Karim Aïnouz still lives in Berlin, Germany. After Firebrand, he filmed Motel Destino in Ceará and is expected to start filming his next fictional feature film Rosebushpruning.
Translated by Elúsio Brasileiro & Guilherme Miranda
