Meryam Joobeur expands on her Oscar-nominated short with her feature debut Who Do I Belong To

It’s been seven years since Meryam Joobeur has been working towards her first feature film, Who Do I Belong To. In 2017, while road-tripping in Tunisia, she ran into two brothers who caught her eye. They inspired her short film Brotherhood, about a family rife with tension when their eldest son returns after a year with a new wife dressed in full Niqab. His father suspects that he has been working for ISIS. The film won a number of awards and also competed at the 92nd Academy Awards in the Best Live Action Short category. 

In many ways, Who Do I Belong To follows in the same footsteps as Brotherhood. It features much of the same cast of non-actors and similar locales, but the world is far more expansive. The film has a haunting and dreamy structure that subverts traditional narrative structure. Shot with bursts of colour and hazy close-ups, the film draws us into the quiet interiority of new perspectives. If Brotherhood was seen through the eyes of the father, Who Do I Belong To adopts the perspective of the mother. The film premiered earlier this year as part of the Berlinale. 

Meryam Joobeur was raised in Tunisia and the United States, but is currently based in Montreal where she attended Dawson College and Concordia University. She joined us from Berlin via Zoom to discuss her film. 

Justine Smith: Can we start with your short film Brotherhood and how it evolved to become Who Do I Belong To?

Meryam Joobeur: The story of the short started in 2017. I’m of Tunisian origin but at the same time, I didn’t know much of the country. I decided to travel to the North for a road trip. On this trip, by chance, I met these two brothers who were walking their sheep on the road and they end up acting in the film. In that moment, I was just captivated by their faces and the landscape because I didn’t see faces like that in my country, so I was inspired by them. At the time, Tunisia was grappling with this big issue, where a lot of men and women had gone to join ISIS. Those two things happened at the same time and inspired this idea of exploring the topic of extremism through a story that takes place in a very rural environment and the repercussions of such an extreme choice on a family. 

I wrote the script, then a year later, I went looking for those brothers because I knew I wanted them to act in the film. I managed to find them after a wild goose chase and convinced them to be part of the film. We started filming the short and while filming the short, I had this idea: the short was a lot about the father’s perspective, I thought it would be really interesting to actually switch to the women for the future. Everything was instinctive to tell the truth. Even as I’m saying it now, it seems like decisions were made, but it was just spontaneous and I just followed my intuition, which led to these two films. 

JS: Instead of a more conventional plot, this film is guided more by intuition and emotions. The filmmaking privileges sensations over action. Did that also just come naturally in terms of the making of the film?

Meryam Joobeur: It was shaped especially in the editing. Deep down, that’s the type of film I wanted to make. In the editing, I worked with a great editor from France, Maxime [Mathis], and we co-edited the film together. As I was touching the material, I realised I kept gravitating towards or crafting was a kind of mood. We worked a lot. The editing took a year and a half. With the sound as well, we wanted to create this universe where you feel sucked in, pulled into the emotions of these characters. I saw it as a beautiful challenge. All my choices were guided, that was my compass in every choice I made aesthetically.

JS: You’re collaborating again with Vincent Gunville, who filmed Brotherhood and some of your other shorts. A lot of the film has a lot of unusual and intimate close-ups. Can you talk about that approach to shooting a character and to shooting faces?

Meryam Joobeur: Vincent is my closest creative collaborator and he’s usually the first person I tell an idea to. As soon as I have a seed of an idea, he’s the one I talk to. This film was very much inspired by portrait photography, even the framing and aspect ratio we picked was inspired by classic 35mm portraits. I don’t know if you know the American photographer Sally Mann, but I would say she was one of the big inspirations for this film. There’s a quality to the image that, I guess the simplest way to say it, is hauntingly beautiful. They’re very evocative. She was a big reference for me. We would share photos with each other. Sometimes a photo would inspire a whole scene. This idea of being in a tunnel with a character’s portrait helped that, like a glance or a gesture can say so much. In the case of Reem, all she had was her eyes and hands to express herself. That was really a beautiful challenge. How do you do that with a glance or with fingers? How can you tell someone’s backstory with very little? We just kind of ended up doing it. That’s why in editing, I found myself constantly going more towards those types of framings, and then using wides and specific moments to create a different vibe or intention.

JS: If I’m not mistaken, Sally Mann is also very famous for taking photographs of her family and children, in particular. Did that influence also shape the way you build the gaze of motherhood?

Meryam Joobeur: How does a mother or a woman confront this reality? Sally Mann is kind of known for that. She did this photo series of the South, places and environments that had experienced the violence from slavery. Like, the history of race. That was an inspiration, how can nature evoke these inner lives or inner traumas? To go back to the question, definitely. How does a mother live this amount of grief and confronting the truth? I gravitated to this idea of working with symbolic imagery and dreams and subconscious and intuition when I switched to a feminine gaze so that naturally came into place.

JS: I don’t want to say that the film uses horror tropes, it’s not quite accurate, but that word “haunting” to describe some of Sally Mann’s photography works. This film feels haunted by spectres or ghosts, can you talk about integrating that within the film?

Meryam Joobeur: Haunted seems like a good word because I felt very possessed by this film throughout. I, myself, was haunted. I was also inspired by local lore of where the film was shot and also Tunisian culture, this idea, specifically in the place where we shot, that spirits exist. People believe it and say they’ve seen it. I found it fascinating to treat it as some kind of fantasy but what if it’s like a reality? I tried to portray it as realistically as I could. We use the word magical realism to describe what I did, but is it magical realism? If people truly believe it, it’s their reality. I tried to evoke that as much as I could. This is the lived reality for them and even for me. I believe in the possibility of connecting to the subconscious and the possibility of feeling connected to nature and all these things. It is a lived reality for me. That’s why I translated it into film as I did, in this kind of maybe strange way.

JS:I think about that a lot too, because why are dreams not considered lived reality? We don’t experience them the way we experience them in our waking lives, but we live through them nonetheless.

Meryam Joobeur: I think it’s especially true for North America or European cultures that are more rational or scientifically based. But, in a lot of places around the world, you can exchange dreams with people and have them help you decipher their symbolic meaning in a very serious way. I find that very beautiful. For me, my dreams have guided me so much in my life, more so than traditional Western therapy. I feel like I’ve gotten way more from trying to connect to my subconscious through hypnosis or trying to unlock the meaning of my dreams, then going into a place of analysis about childhood trauma. So, I agree with you. I treat them and live my life as if it’s true. Even though it’s not scientifically proven, I’ve chosen to have faith.

JS: In terms of structuring the film. We see many films about joining ISIS or the experience of being in it, but there are very few films that look at the aftermath of the family. What motivated this choice?

Meryam Joobeur: I didn’t want this to be a film about ISIS. It’s not really. It was never my intention. My intention was more looking at extreme choices and extreme acts and trying to understand the roots, or not understand. Understand is not a good word. “Meditate” on the roots of it. When I did my research and I was trying to look for a common thread of the reasons why people go, there wasn’t one clear answer. The only thing I had in mind was family dynamics and the dangers of victimhood. Maybe this question of personal responsibility, questions of choice; these universal things that may need to be meditated on on a wider scale to avert something like this. I was more interested in the repercussions of the extreme choice. What do we do in the aftermath of this? How do we move on? How do we heal? I was drawn to that maybe for personal reasons. 

JS: Maybe this is something coming more from me than the text, but there feels like this concept of balance exists within the film. There’s so much violence and extremity, that one sense that it needs to be evened out. I’m not sure exactly what my question is, it’s more that, I’m curious about this question of harmony; spiritual or familial harmony within the film and if it speaks at all to your process?

Meryam Joobeur: I think harmony is interesting. This question or this feeling that I have is sometimes we’re afraid of certain things. In the case of the mother, she lives her biggest fear, right? She lives the worst thing that can happen to you and sometimes we can’t imagine the aftermath of something like that, but she finds herself still alive after it. I kind of leave it open in the sense that she’s alive and now she has to make a choice of how to live. She still has a husband, she still has a community, she still has herself. I think of this question of how to make peace with that darkness, but also try to see what goodness in your life and be in service of that. It’s something I’ve reflected a lot of even recently in my life. We get preoccupied with what’s not going right in our life, but there’s so much good.

We put our energy into the negative. There’s a lot of questions that we keep open that don’t have clear answers. I believe we can always make a choice of how to live our lives. So, harmony. There’s nature. This idea of whatever happened, nature comes back. It always finds a way to grow back, even in abandoned houses. 

I’m in Berlin right now, it’s a very interesting city to be in, because the remnants of history are everywhere. Recently, I was in a lush and beautiful park but then I realised the hill I was standing on was built from all the rubble of war that the women of Berlin gathered and put here. Now it’s a forest. I find that both very jarring and beautiful. This idea that life continues and there’s choices to be made. In this case, they took war rubble and made a park. That’s maybe a tangent.

JS: I find it interesting too. I really loved being in Berlin for similar reasons, it’s a city where a lot of choices were made and deeply considered. How do you keep history alive? I do think there’s a question about the success of that project, particularly over the past year. Did they learn from the past or is it all just a performance?

Meryam Joobeur: That’s a very interesting question. The issue now, the problem is, it seemed for many years they were at the forefront of human rights. At least my interpretation of the situation is, guilt is blocking them from doing what’s right or seeing the situation and taking a step back. It’s unfortunate, but I’m not surprised by the reaction of Germany right now. They can’t see clearly.

JS: I was reading about Art Spiegelman’s Maus, particularly Maus II, and how his father who survived the concentration camps became quite a bitter and racist old man. There’s this idea that experiencing or living through hardship will make us stronger or somehow better, but sometimes, it makes us worse. 

Meryam Joobeur: Definitely, I think it can. The question I had, the one I’m meditating on, is did he have another choice? I would love to believe that we do. I really want to believe we do because it’s a hopeful way of living life. That’s why I had the counterpoint of Bilal in the film, his childhood friend who also had a difficult childhood but made a very different choice. It’s a tricky question. 

JS: You’ve been working on this story, on these two films, for almost ten years now. Even now, travelling with it, it’s just a different iteration of “being” in its world. How do you emerge from that?

Meryam Joobeur: It was a challenge. This film wasn’t very easy to carry for five years on a personal level. What I did right after the film was dance classes for like five months. I wanted to do something joyful and silly and different and new just to shake it off. Just to have a breath of fresh air. I found that really liberating and healing. I needed that after the film. I needed joy. I needed healing. It’s funny, when you finish a film, most people ask you, “what’s your next film?” when you’re literally burned out and want to crawl under a bed. There’s a big value in just taking space and time to do things slowly and gently and let inspiration come to you. These two films, literally seven years of my life, literally happened because I ran into two boys on the road. That changed the trajectory of my life. There’s an element of just letting things come to you.

Who do I Belong To is now playing in Montreal theatres.

---

For our latest in film and TV, please visit the Film & TV section.