Tea time with La veillée [The Wake]
Interview with Riad Bouchoucha, director of La veillée [The Wake]
What interests you about mourning, why did you want to the action to take place at a wake?
My desire to situate the action at a wake comes from a personal experience. Like the protagonist, I lost my mother and I was surprised by the attitudes of some of the close family and friends who came to keep vigil beside the body. I felt a great wave of loneliness, as if I were a stranger in my own family. I wanted to tell the story of someone who was searching for intimacy without truly finding it until the raising of the body.
Are you specifically interested in father-son relationships and do you see yourself making other films on the subject?
I’m most inspired and moved by family stories. I have the feeling I don’t know my own parents very well, even though they’ve given me everything. There’s an element of non-verbal communication in the transmission between parents and children. I’m fascinated by that and I find that works well in film. I think my next projects will focus on questions of family and inter-generational transmission, with a strong female character. I’m very inspired by my mother’s life.
What interested you about ritual decorum?
I’ve experienced the weight of tradition, so it was an important aspect of the film. I think it’s a good way to signify that Salim has left the family circle. Tradition – Muslim tradition in my film – is a key element in family identity. But Salim doesn’t have those codes, which marginalizes him a bit. The issue for me was to make it immediately clear that he’d gone over “to the other side”, without having to say so explicitly.
How did you create the breathing in the film? Did you intend that from the beginning, did it happen while filming or did you do everything during editing? Did you shoot in one day?
The moments of suspension, especially in the second part of the film, were already present during the writing stages. I had already envisioned them and they became more polished at each draft and in discussions with the crew. The film needed to speed up, and the machine needed to get stuck, before suddenly dropping into introspection and silence. Editing was essential in crystallizing the breathing, the silences. The shot reverse shot lets you stretch silences that didn’t exist during filming, and edit out lines that are too obvious and explanatory. It’s its own form of writing. Filming lasted five days.
Have you discovered any advantages that the short film form offers?
I don’t know whether the short film format afforded me any advantages. I actually have the feeling that the constraints are more important. You have to achieve a degree of efficiency when you’re writing, make things clear and intelligible right away, without explaining too much or being didactic. If a scene doesn’t work in a twenty-four-minute film, that’s all anyone will talk about. But in a feature film, I have the feeling that some passages can be more conventional without that impacting the overall experience.
Which works did you draw from?
For this film, my models were the films of James Gray (Little Odessa, The Yards, Two Lovers), Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather) and Ettore Scola (A Special Day), as much for their narrative arcs as for their aesthetic, the indoor staging, the lighting and setting.
La veillée [The Wake] is part of National Competition F2.
