Breakfast with Après (After)

Interview with Wissam Charaf, director of Après (After)

 How did you come up with the idea for this film? Did you do any research on real-life stories, or is it purely fictional?
That’s a pretty complicated story in itself. For several years, I was having trouble getting financing for my feature film project Tombé du ciel [Fallen From the Sky]. In a fit of desperation, I decided to cut the script up into a medium-length film and a short in the hopes that one of the new projects would make it through a financing commission. So Après is a short film that is drawn from the script for a feature film where the protagonist returns to his parents’ home after the war to find the house deserted. That was the initial idea. At the same time, I was reading a novel called Death in Beirut by Tawfiq Yusuf’Awwad, one of the great modern Lebanese writers. The book was written before the outbreak of the civil war in Lebanon and tells the story of Tamima Nassour, a young woman from a poor family in the south of Lebanon who goes to Beirut to study at the university. Through the men who try to charm her, she comes into contact with faces that are harbingers of the war. I tried to imagine what that woman would have become a few years later, when she had had her fill of love affairs, seduction, disappointment, debaucheries: a fallen woman who would end up in a red sports car in a forgotten countryside ready to commit suicide. So, to develop this idea of a character returning to his parents’ home, I tried to have those two characters meet by chance. That became the plot of the short film, which I managed to get financed, and which I shot in June 2015. The funniest thing about the story is that I got financing for the medium-length film at the same moment, which meant that I was able to make the feature-length version of Tombé du ciel six months later. And that happened after a period of ten years when I couldn’t get a single film financed.

 Why did you choose not to give us a clue or reason for your main character’s imprisonment? Did his connection to prison interest you, or was it simply a way of creating the necessary split?
The fact that he is getting out of prison gives enough information. Barring an error of justice, people in prisons have generally committed crimes. For me, the nature of the crime would have situated the character more fully in a real context: a killer, a rapist, a terrorist, a thug. What I wanted was a character about whom all we know is that he was someone capable of perpetrating evil. That’s aready a significant character trait, and I wanted to keep everything else vague, sort of unreal, as in a fable. And the first shot arleady gives some clues: a knife thrust, a fight, a kidnapping, shots fired. As such, leaving the prison simply becomes a means of getting to the bit that comes after: What do you do after you get out of prison? You go home, if you still have a home.

 In the film, the character seems to begin by searching for his life “before”. Why did you want him to start by looking backward rather than try a new beginning?
He goes home out of instinct. No one came to pick him up and he’s curious to know why; he’d like to see his mother again. And perhaps he’s matured, perhaps he’d initially like to repair the damage he’d done at home, in his village, in order to be able embark upon a new beginning. Returning to the past is a theme that I cherish in my films. And it has a direct relationship to the repressed memory of the Lebanese Civil War. In every village you hear horrible stories that no one wants to talk about today for fear of reawakening old demons, now that the country is in relative peace.

 Why were you interested in your characters’ relationships to their families and friends, to the disappointment they cause and suffer, just like the hopes they may harbor… and may also give rise to?
What I was after was a fleeting impression. Of two beings, one who’s had his share of violence, the other who’s had her share of love. And to show that these two emotions can be equally destructive. And also to show that violence can turn into wisdom after a period of time, just as love can turn into despair. And these two souls who meet and experience an attraction, however restrained, a sort of shared despair. There is no direct seduction, more like a shared wandering, a weird moment after all spent together in this deserted shack that brings them together, giving them hope. As for their respective friends and families, they’re both losers among them. The man finds a present that seems to reject him, in this village where he no longer has any family or allies. The woman is unable to commit suicide, to make an end of it; she’s constantly hassled by her lovers. All they have left is this forced cohabitation where they gradually lower their guard.

 In your film, you make a point of playing with grenades. Where did that idea come from?
When I was nine, I was seriously injured by a grenade in Lebanon. It was something of a miracle that I survived, and grenades have remained a strong object from my childhood. And then there are “grenades” that are the fruit of pomegranate trees, a very beautiful fruit with a noble flavor. Moreover, in Arabic, the fruit and the weapon are both represented by the same word (roummana), just like in French. The pomegranate is a fruit that symbolizes fertilité, life, while the grenade is a symbol of death. The metaphor around these two objects, that symbolize opposite things bearing the same name, seemed to me to be an apt comparison between the former criminal who returns to a dead village and the woman who returns to life, both of these entities finding themselves together under the same roof.

 Any cinematic coups de cœur in the past year you’d like to tell us about?
Albert Serra’s La mort de Louis XIV [The Death of Louis XIV], Alain Guiraudie’s Staying Vertical, and Kung Fu Panda 3. Unfortunately, since I live in Lebanon, I miss a great many films.

 If you’ve already been to Clermont-Ferrand, could you share with us an anecdote from the festival? If not, what are your expectations for this year?
I was here in 2007 to present a short film, L’armée des fourmis [The Army of Ants]. I remember that there was a lot of snow and that I ate “aligot” [A specialty of the Auvergne region consisting of mashed pototes and cheese. – Editor’s note]!

Après is being shown in National Competition F5.